


i love it when you give me things

by youabird (nevulon)



Series: you ought to give me wedding rings [3]
Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Communication, Eddie Kaspbrak is Bad at Feelings, Engagement, Established Relationship, Families of Choice, Fights, M/M, Romance, Shrimp, Slice of Life, Stanley Uris: Reluctant Wedding Planner, Wedding Planning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-24
Updated: 2021-02-24
Packaged: 2021-03-17 23:20:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 25,984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29233662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nevulon/pseuds/youabird
Summary: After acquiring a pre-fiancé at Thanksgiving, Eddie goes to Los Angeles, New York and back to Atlanta again.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Series: you ought to give me wedding rings [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2099805
Comments: 47
Kudos: 183





	1. Dec. 31, 2017

**Author's Note:**

> at last! an epilogue! to everyone who asked for one, sorry this is late! i forgot how to write for much of january, which impeded the writing process quite a bit.
> 
> general content warnings include: references to canon-typical derry shittyness (death, murder, injury, homophobia, bad parenting, etc.); eddie’s disability; discussions of sexuality and identity; myra and sonia's past emotional and verbal abuse.
> 
> both the title & the series title are from The Book of Love by Peter Gabriel, for reasons that should be pretty obvious.
> 
> this is for everyone who asked for a sequel, but it’s mostly for kit, whose work is so perfect that it made me want to write in this fandom.

In the waning hours of 2017, Eddie was doing something he had never done before in his _life:_ he was cooking shrimp.

But then, before going back to Derry, Eddie had never done a lot of things. He had never left the East Coast. He had never had surgery, or really been very sick or injured at all, despite spending most of his life locking himself away for fear of harm. He had never spent a holiday with people who gave a shit about him, and look at him now: Eddie was spending New Year's Eve with four of his six closest friends in the world. For that matter, Eddie had never, not once, looked forward to New Year's Eve. The holiday always made him think of the years of his life slowly unspooling themselves, only to slip away in a monotonous parade of long commutes, tense arguments, and wasted days.

But today was different. Instead of grimly waiting for another year to slither to a close, Eddie was happy and warm, standing at a charcoal grill, making dinner for his friends and for the love of his life. The clock may have been ticking, but it was counting down to the start of a new year that hung bright and fresh and full of promise, like a rainbow unfurling after forty-one years of rain.

It was entirely possible that Eddie was the luckiest person on the whole damn planet.

Minus the shrimp.

"How's it going, Eddie?" Mike called. He and the rest of the Losers were sitting at a picnic table, eating chips and the salsa Stan had made. Eddie had not cooked food, by himself, for a group of people since the late nineties; consequently, he was freaking out. He had ordered everyone to back the hell off, so the others sat, chatting and relaxing, at a picnic table while Eddie did battle with the grill.

"Almost done!" he yelled back.

According to the internet, shrimp only needed to be cooked for three minutes per side, but Eddie carefully inspected each one with his barbecue tongs for maximum pinkness anyway. He detested shrimp, and he was furious that he was doing this—Richie had sweetly asked him if he might like to pitch in with the cooking, which Eddie correctly interpreted as a dare and a challenge—but it _was_ nice that the shrimp went from blue and slimy to bright pink when they were cooked through.

When he was satisfied that every single shrimp was a robust shade of pink, Eddie slid the skewers off the grill and onto the serving tray. "Okay," he said, "They're ready. Rich?"

Richie, sitting at the head of the table and lost in conversation with Stan, whipped his head around. "Oh," he said, eyes wide and shiny, "Eddie my love, I didn't—I didn't think you were cooking shrimp for _me."_

Eddie stared at him. "Who else would I be cooking the shrimp for? Patty, Stan, do _you_ eat shrimp?"

"We don't," Patty said, "Although I'm sure they're delicious, Eddie."

She was trying not to smile. They were all trying not to smile, except for Richie, who was looking around, clearly trying to find someone else to fall on this particular sword. "Bill, don't you want to try Eddie's delicious shrimp?"

"Is that a euphemism?" Bill said, grinning.

Eddie was starting to get irritated. He had _peeled_ these shrimp, stripping off their hard carapaces before seasoning them and then driving little wooden skewers through their cold, disgusting bodies. "Richard," he said testily, "I touched _invertebrates_ for you. Get over here and eat one."

Ever the performer, Richie trundled over to the grill with all the enthusiasm of a condemned man heading to the scaffold. This had everyone in stitches: Mike was slumped into Bill's side, laughing so hard his shoulders were shaking, while Patty and Stan had both turned around, twin smiles on their faces, to watch Richie delicately select a shrimp on its skewer and hold it up. The sun had long since set, but the deck was illuminated by ropes of Edison bulbs; there was more than enough light to see Richie sniffing the shrimp as if checking it for poison.

Eddie had spent two hours of his New Year's Eve poring over various recipes while Richie, Stan and Patty watched _Ghostbusters II_ , all because he wanted to ensure he wouldn't murder Richie via botulism; he was rapidly losing patience here. "Would you please just _eat it?"_ he demanded.

Pretending to be offended, Richie nevertheless bit into the shrimp's curlicue body. He took his sweet time chewing it, too.

"Verdict?" Stan said.

"It's... Hmm..."

"I'll kill you, Richie," Eddie said through gritted teeth.

Richie flashed a smile at him and swallowed. "It's good, Eddie," he said, "Why, I'd say it's damn near edible."

The others laughed. Eddie, outraged, threw his hands into the air. "Fuck you! You _made_ me make them, if they suck it's your fucking fault."

"All I said was, wouldn't it be good for you to expand your culinary horizons," Richie said, even as he leaned in close to kiss him. He wisely didn't try to get near Eddie's mouth, and he held the remnants of his shrimp at arm's length. Eddie, fighting the urge to be charmed, grudgingly let Richie press his lips to his temple. "And you _promised_ me, when you proposed, that you would cook me shrimp."

"It was not a fucking proposal!" he snapped, for the millionth time.

Mike, still snorting his laughter into Bill's shoulder, raised his head to smile at him. "How much are you hating this, Eddie?"

"Oh, his eyeballs are about to pop," Richie said cheerfully. "Anyone else want shrimp? Or drinks? Everyone has to try Patty's sangria, it's phenomenal."

The roof deck was dotted with identical wrought-iron picnic tables, and they had claimed several of them, one of which Richie and Patty had turned into a full bar. There were pitchers of sangria, beer and wine coolers, and a bevy of mixers, garnishes and mismatched glassware raided from Richie's kitchen. There was even a jar of cocktail onions—no one had touched those, obviously. While Eddie remained at the grill, adding the burgers on to cook, Richie bounced over to the bar and started pouring drinks.

When Richie had suggested grilling on the rooftop for New Year's Eve, Eddie had been nervous. The communal space was expansive and quite nice, the large, tiled deck fenced in by green metal railings and looking out on three sides at the city below. There was a sign-up system to use the deck, but surely other people would want to come up here—if not to hang out all evening, then at least to see fireworks. Yet so far nobody had bothered them. Richie had assured him they wouldn't—"We're in fucking LA, Eds, there's way better places to party than the roof of my apartment building"—but Eddie remained watchful.

Eddie wasn't nervous for himself. Back in New York, Richie had gotten into trouble with his manager, because Richie had gone to finish up his tour but had neglected to _warn_ Steve that he was now kinda-sorta-engaged. To a man. There had been several terse emails exchanged, including a long one that Richie drafted nervously on his phone while Eddie pressed sprinkles into the sugar cookies they made together, but Richie swore everything was fine now. The long and short of it was that Richie and Steve were now working on an expedited coming-out process that would preserve Richie's industry reputation _and_ Eddie's privacy.

It was all very weird. Eddie wasn't used to having privacy to safeguard, let alone having someone who cared about his feelings to the degree that Richie did. Eddie kept waiting for all the love he had for Richie to stop taking up quite so much _space,_ but it gave no signs of diminishing. Instead it was like the tide, rising higher and higher til it had reshaped the coastline of Eddie's life. Before they left New York, Richie had, with obvious trepidation, asked Eddie to come meet Steve with him in January, so that Steve could explain what was going to happen once Richie came out; Eddie had found this offer so unbearably romantic that he'd had to sit and stare into space for the rest of the evening, stunned into silence.

While Eddie was having these private, tender thoughts, Bill wandered over to him, two glasses of sangria in hand. Eddie was just glad it wasn't tequila; it had been months since Blackout Wednesday, but he didn't know if he'd ever be able to drink margaritas again after that.

"Here you go," Bill said, trading Eddie the second glass for a plateful of shrimp. He promptly ruined the nice gesture by saying, "Don't you look like a natural at the grill."

Eddie shot him a withering look. "Eat my entire ass, Bill."

"That's gotta be Richie's job." No sooner had Bill said this then his smile dropped and he said, "I mean, I don't mean to joke about it—"

"Ugh, Bill," Eddie said, "It's _fine,_ you weirdo."

Eddie had made the mistake, once, of asking Bill about his sexuality. It was in early December, after Richie had gone back to touring, and Eddie was rattling around New York, buffeted by longing like a Gothic novel heroine. Feeling introspective one night, he'd texted Bill. Eddie was too old and too enlightened to hero-worship Bill any more, but Bill _had_ bravely blazed a trail for short divorcés successfully dating extremely hot men; surely he would have something useful to say.

What Bill had actually done was call him, immediately, from the Arizona desert. "I like—the term bisexual," he said, whole syllables getting lost in the poor connection, "But you know! There's a lot—it's about how you feel!" Eddie had taken exhaustive notes while Bill yammered out heartfelt, staticky nonsense and had ended up more baffled than before. He then reached out to Mike. Mike, who was not a pampered celebrity with a proclivity to navel-gaze, but a regular person who'd had to navigate being Black and queer in fucking _Derry_ of all places, had emailed back a single sentence: _Google is free._

In the end, Eddie had chosen the path of least resistance. If bisexual worked for Bill, it would work for him. They had both been married to women and were now dating childhood friends of the same gender; by the transitive property, what was Bill's was Eddie's. And, to Eddie's surprise, he _liked_ having a label. Despite having repressed it for four decades, Eddie found his newly unearthed desire to sleep with men far less terrifying than he'd expected. Maybe it was the other shit he had clogging up his skull; maybe he had just been so painfully disconnected from any notion of his attraction to men that it slipped through his fucked-up brain more or less unscathed.

Unfortunately, asking for Bill's advice had kicked his big brotherly instincts into even higher gear. Now he regularly emailed Eddie helpful links and took an active, vaguely condescending interest in his thoughts on their contents. Eddie had kind of enjoyed having Bill in his blood debt, post-impalement; he was less enthused about Bill acting like his Sherpa out of the closet. 

"I'm just glad you're happy and doing well," Bill said, and he smiled that slightly wounded, leading-man smile that always reminded Eddie of why he'd gravitated to Bill in the first place. "Anyway, how are you liking LA? Did Richie show you guys around?"

"It's good. We did the Getty, and LACMA, and the Walk of Fame. But mostly we've just been hanging out with Stan and Patty," Eddie said, shrugging. Los Angeles was pleasant enough, but all the best moments of this vacation had taken place in Richie's kitchen, laughing with Stan and Patty, everyone talking over each other. "What about you guys? How was Christmas in Connecticut?"

Bill grimaced. "I forgot how much I hate snow," he said. He and Mike had spent Christmas with Mike's second cousins; they had only just gotten back to LA the day before. "But Mike's family is very nice. Overwhelming, but nice. How was yours?"

"Festive. Richie made us do everything, including ice skating at Rockefeller Center and the windows at Saks Fifth Avenue. Which, what the fuck, they're just windows with crap in them?" It was the wildest fucking thing—Richie had dragged him into the heart of tourist New York to look at the outside of a department building. They hadn't even gone in. But Eddie noticed Stan approaching them, so he hastily added, "But I mean. I was happy to do it."

This made Stan's expression curl up in amusement. "Eddie," he said, "You know I'm not auditing your relationship, right."

"Not even a little?" Bill asked, smirking.

But it wasn't a joke, not to Eddie. He and Stan still had the no bullshit pact, for one. For two, Stan was his only friend who was happily married and had been for a long time. Eddie already obsessively studied all his friends and coworkers who were married, engaged, happily partnered or even just seemed content with themselves, trying to pick up tips—but he paid especially close attention to Stan and Patty. What they shared together was good, and it was real, and Derry had not destroyed it. Every smile and gesture and simple kindness, Eddie tucked away for future study.

"I want you to think this relationship is a good idea," he confessed. "Which, I know. Not your business, but I know I did everything out of order, and I just—I want to be good to him."

In that moment, his gaze couldn't help straying to Richie. Richie was pouring a can of Sprite into a novelty beer stein for Patty while she and Mike tried not to laugh. With a flourish, he stabbed a toothpick into one of the pickled onions in its little glass jar and then tossed it into Patty's drink. This made Patty double over with mirth, Mike steadying her with a hand on her shoulder. When Richie noticed Eddie's gaze, he waved, wearing a small, contented smile just for Eddie. As usual, Eddie felt fucking bowled over by him, bowled over by how wonderful and handsome and funny and perfect he was.

Stan touched Eddie's shoulder. "You're doing good, Eddie," he said kindly. "You really are." 

Eddie didn't say all the embarrassing things he wanted to. He was sure they were all visible on his face, anyway.

"Speaking of which," Bill asked, picking up Eddie's tongs to flip a hamburger over, "Did the two of you set a date yet?"

"No," Eddie said, returning his attention to the grill. Bill was doing a horrible job with the tongs, but Eddie was happy to be a spectator; if Bill wanted to cook that was his prerogative. "I mean, first of all, we have to decide where we're going to live. Second of all, Stan told me to wait a year before I'm even allowed to propose."

"I _really_ didn't think you'd wait that long," Stan said.

"Why not? You gave me good advice, so I'm following it. Not like Bill telling me to buy a fucking _plant_."

Appalled, Bill squawked and tried to smack Eddie with the barbecue tongs; Eddie lunged for him and nearly overturned his cup of sangria into the grill. At this point Stan intervened and separated them. "Richie!" he called, "Come get your pre-fiancé, he's being a fire hazard."

"Am not!" Eddie said, but it was a token protest; he really _did_ want Richie to come over and get him. And Richie, beaming, did so.

Richie helped him cook the rest of the food. Aside from Eddie's shrimp, Richie had bought burgers, both beef and veggie, and Bill and Mike had contributed two kinds of salad and a tray of cupcakes—gluten-free, of course—in a dazzling array of flavors. It felt more like a Fourth of July cookout than a New Year's Eve party, but maybe that was the weather—it had been warm during the day, warm enough that Eddie was still wearing shorts and shirtsleeves. Eddie wasn't sold on California as a whole, but credit where credit was due: it was fucking spectacular not to be bundled up and frostbitten, even in the middle of winter.

Surprisingly, no one intruded on their peaceful bubble up on the roof. They could hear the sounds of other parties, wafting up from street level or carried on the wind, but nobody seemed interested in staking out the roof. The only interruption of any kind was Ben video-calling them from New York.

Ben and Bev had not been able to join them in California after all—Bev's newest line was getting lots of buzz, and she had been invited to some very slinky fashion soiree in Manhattan. Ben had apologized about this at great length, whereas Bev had just said, "No way am I missing the chance to be at a party with Rei Kawakubo! You fuckers will just have to come visit us next time."

And so, at 12:02am, Eastern standard time, Richie's phone began to buzz. "Hey, Haystack's calling me!" he shouted, waving them all in close. The California Losers dutifully packed around Richie as best they could, crammed together to be in view of the camera. Ben's face appeared. His cheeks were rosy from the cold, but he was beaming from ear to ear.

"Hi guys! Happy New Year!"

"Happy New Year, buddy! Report back from the future," Richie said, angling his phone so that Ben could see at least parts of the other five of them. In the smoggy darkness they probably just looked like shapes, but they waved anyway. "How's 2018? Are there flying cars or what?"

"So far it's the same," Ben said cheerfully. Bev, in the background said, "This party has the best caviar I've ever eaten in my _life_."

Richie shot Eddie a brief, hopeful glance; Eddie, frowning, shook his head. No fucking way was he eating caviar.

On the other end of the line, Ben stood on a balcony, wearing a silk scarf over an artfully distressed tuxedo with a tartan bow-tie. Snowflakes gilded his hair and eyebrows, and even through the tinny iPhone speakers, Eddie could hear people cheering and taxis honking. It seemed outrageous that he and Richie had been with him and Bev in New York just a few days ago, and now they were here, on the other side of the country, but still among friends.

Ben quickly recapped the party. It was all famous fashion designers, nobody he knew, but Bev had gotten a chance to talk to Rei Kawakubo, so she was over the moon. There was a real champagne fountain—Ben hadn't had any, obviously—and a spun sugar recreation of the Brooklyn Bridge. "It's a crazy party," Ben gushed, looking starry-eyed. "But what about you? How's your night going?"

"Eddie cooked shrimp," Stan said dryly. "They were pretty adequate."

"Eddie cooked _what?!_ " said Bev's disembodied voice.

At that, Eddie snatched for Richie's phone. "The shrimp were more than fucking _adequate,_ " he said hotly, even as Richie gently tugged the phone out of his grasp. The others were laughing at him—Bill collapsed into hysterics, the drama queen—but Eddie would not be deterred. "Also shut up, Stan! You didn't even try them!"

"They were good," Mike agreed, "Stan's just riling Eddie up. As usual."

"You guys look like you're having a great time," Ben said, beaming. "We miss you all! Can't wait to see you again!"

"We do miss you," Bev said, appearing in the shot as a reddish blur in a white gown, "But I'm freezing my ass off and the open bar only lasts til one AM. So we love you, happy New Year, sending you all a big kiss from both of us!"

They only just had time to quickly send their love and then the call disconnected. The screen went black and for a brief moment, Eddie could see their six faces reflected in the black rectangle of Richie's phone screen.

Then Eddie turned to Stan. "Stan," he said, very seriously, "Talk shit about my shrimp again and I'll throw you off the roof."

That was the only interruption. Apart from that, they ate, drank and chatted in perfect solitude. Once the food was cooked, Eddie shut the grill and joined the others in the ring of deck chairs they had dragged into a loose circle, conversation flowing easily. The sounds of other people's parties had gotten louder—the muted thump of bass was leaking upwards from someone's downstairs apartment—but nobody bothered them.

Around eleven, the temperature dipped down to chilly. Not real cold—it wasn't even a shadow of New York a few days ago, let alone the bitter iciness of a Maine December—but cold enough that Eddie was forced to go down to Richie's apartment and dress in long pants. While he was there, he picked through Richie's living room, looking for blankets. Richie's apartment, much like Eddie's back in New York, was lightly furnished, and he didn't have a lot of spare throws, but Eddie made do.

He returned to the roof with an old spare quilt and the fuzzy throw blanket Richie kept draped on the back of the couch. "Is this okay?" he asked Richie, showing him his haul.

"What, these? Sure, Eds," Richie said. Ever since Ben called, he'd kept his phone out, taking photos of everyone, documenting the holiday. He lifted the lens and pointed it at Eddie; Eddie smiled automatically, arms still full of blankets. "So long as everybody's warm, right? We can always throw 'em in the laundry later."

"Right," Eddie agreed, deeply pleased by Richie's use of the word _we_.

It really wasn't _that_ cold, but it was cozy. Bill and Mike split the quilt and Stan draped the throw on Patty's shoulders like a cape. He called her _my queen,_ and then kissed her on the cheek; Bill and Richie hooted their disapproval but Stan, as always, ignored them entirely, flouncing off to get a drink.

"It really does look good on you," Eddie said seriously, sliding into the chair next to Patty. She looked up at him, surprised but happy to see him. "I mean, not the zig zag, but the blue."

"Thanks," Patty said, smiling. "I like that jacket on you."

Eddie, nestled warmly in a shearling jacket he'd found in Richie's hall closet, felt so luxuriously good that it was as if he were getting away with something. Blushing, he pulled the jacket closer around his body. "Thanks Patty."

"I meant to tell you, by the way," Patty added, "The shrimp were good!"

"I thought you said you don't eat them?"

Smiling, Patty shrugged. "Well, I tried a bite of Mike's. Normally I'm less strict than Stan is, I'm just off them temporarily."

Eddie had been married to a woman for enough years to put together the temporary aversion to shrimp and the glass of Sprite in Patty's hand. His first reaction was instinctual, nauseating panic, and he gripped the arm of his chair til a bolt of pain shot up his shoulder.

Eddie was terrified of babies. Or for them, he guessed—even if you subtracted the multiple confrontations with child-eating clowns, Eddie had had a front row seat to the unkindness the world could rain down upon kids. And babies, especially, were ten pounds of vulnerability; their bones weren't even solid. They were just lovable, cuddly bull's-eyes.

But Patty, sitting there in her blanket shawl with her glasses perched low on her nose, looked calm, almost serene. This was good news, Eddie told himself. It was good that Patty and Stan, who were kind to each other, who loved each other, were going to have a baby. Neither of them were Sonia, for one. For another, when bad things happened, Patty and Stan could deal with it. They had dealt with Derry, after all. And hadn't that been the point of Derry, of going back, of Eddie's near death by misadventure? To make the world just a little bit safer for other people's children?

"Patty," he said. "I—that's great."

It _was_ great. It was great because it was Stan and Patty, and they were good, conscientious people, with a fenced backyard and robust health insurance and a desire to do the right thing even when it was difficult, which was maybe all you could ask for in a parent. Patty smiled again and said quietly, "Don't tell the others." She pressed a hand against her abdomen lightly. "Not yet. I'm only a few months along."

Heart still thudding in his chest, Eddie wondered why she had chosen _him_ of all people to bring into her confidence. He also wondered if he could keep a secret of this magnitude from Richie. "Can I tell Richie, at least?"

"Stan's going to tell him tomorrow. Just the two of them."

"Oh, good. That'll mean a lot to him." Richie would probably cry. He and Stan had been friends first, friends longest; it made sense that Stan would tell Richie first. In contrast, Eddie could not explain why Patty had chosen him to confide in, but he was nevertheless touched by her trust. Doing his best to keep his voice level, he said, "Thanks. For telling me. That's—that's really exciting."

"I agree!" Patty said, and she laughed. There was a nervous quality to it—high-pitched and fluttery—but there was joy in there, too. "And how's being pre-engaged?"

Eddie's blush deepened. Everyone made fun of him for insisting that they were _not_ engaged yet, but Patty didn't seem to be teasing; she had turned to face him, telegraphing her interest in his words. Which was almost worse, somehow, than the teasing. "I know it sounds dumb, since we're planning to get married already," he said, "But. Thanksgiving was spontaneous. Bev basically shoved me through your front door, and I just—I don't want him to miss out on anything. I want the proposal to be as big and memorable as he deserves."

"That's really sweet, Eddie," Patty said.

Shrugging, Eddie smiled ruefully at her. "Plus, Stan told me to wait a year."

"So we should expect a proposal this Thanksgiving?"

"Definitely."

"You know what," Stan said, jump-scaring both of them as he appeared at Patty's side with a fresh Sprite—this time served in a glass champagne coupe with the words _Elton John's Academy Awards Party, 2011_ etched upon the side. "I didn't know when we agreed to host Thanksgiving that our house was going to be the backdrop for all your romantic milestones for the rest of time."

"Does this mean we can't get married in your back yard?" Eddie said, trying to keep his tone light to cover the fact that he was deadly serious.

Stan's sigh carried a profound air of martyrdom about it. "We'll see," he said.

"See what?" Richie said. He was still sitting with Bill and Mike, engrossed in a discussion about which fancy restaurants in Malibu Bill should take Mike to, but his ears must have pricked up Eddie said _married_.

Eddie tried to seem innocent. "Nothing!"

It was unlikely that Richie was fooled—Richie was, Eddie knew, insightful where he was obtuse, especially about feelings. Fixing Eddie with a narrow-eyed, suspicious look, Richie said nothing but instead lifted his camera, pointed it without looking, and captured a photo of Bill mid-swallow. "Click!" he said as the flash went off.

Bill, spluttering, gulped down his mouthful of sangria like a goldfish. "Richie," he said, dabbing at his shirt collar and trying to look fierce, "If you post a picture of me drunk on Instagram, I'll have my publicist kick your ass."

"Oh yeah?" Richie's laugh made his nose scrunch up. "Well, my publicist can kick your publicist's ass."

"You have a publicist?" Eddie wondered.

He still didn't know anything about Richie's job, really. Which had been fine, when they were long-distance best friends—Richie sure as shit had no idea what _Eddie's_ job entailed. But they were going to be married. Eddie's stomach squirmed happily each and every time he remembered that: they were going to be _married_. He made a note to himself to have Steve explain all the various people who worked for Richie. Not for any reason—just so he could know.

"Bill," Mike said, "You've only had two glasses of sangria, I think you're okay."

"Have you tried this? It's very strong. Not," he added hastily, looking over at Patty and raising his hands as if to apologize for the slight, "That—that that's a bad thing!"

Patty laughed. "No offense taken. Richie said to make the sangria 'Applebee's-level strong.'"

Three things happened more or less at once: Patty smirked broadly; Eddie whipped his head around to glare at Richie; and Richie stuck his cellphone camera in Eddie's face. "Click!" he crowed, while Eddie blinked away the flashbulb after-image now etched onto his corneas. "Oh, Eds, you look so _handsome_ in this!"

"Delete that!"

"No!" Richie said, clutching the phone to his collarbone, as if Eddie might come swat it out of his hand. "You look nice! I'm setting it as my background."

"Why are you taking all these fucking pictures, anyway? It's _dark."_

"Excuse me for wanting a record of our first New Year's Eve together," Richie huffed, but his knuckles were white with how hard he was gripping his phone. "Someday, when we're old as balls, don't you want to look back and remember all this? How it felt to be young and hot and hanging out on the roof with one-and-a-half celebrities?"

Eddie ignored what was clearly a joke at Bill's expense and instead let himself imagine a soft, amber-colored future where he and Richie would look back fondly to this very evening. He felt his face relax, his frown slipping off to be be replaced by a soft, no doubt dopey, smile. "Pine trees," he said.

"Huh?"

Still molten with love, Eddie shook his head. "I'll explain later."

"Hey! Speaking of later," called Mike, "What time is it now, Rich?"

Richie gave Eddie another long, searching look, but he abandoned the question he clearly meant to ask and peered down at his phone screen. "Eleven forty-four, Mikey."

"Perfect!" Mike said, beaming. "Bill, where did we put the party hats?"

Party hats? Eddie had only just enough time to wonder if he'd misheard when Richie spun around and goggled at Mike and Bill, who were now searching the ground around them intently. "You bought _party hats?"_ he demanded.

"Yes. It's festive!" Mike said happily. Bill emerged from under the picnic table with a large Target bag; he held it open as Mike rifled through it. From its depths, Mike produced something gold and shiny: party hats. Cone-shaped, with bright puffballs of crepe paper on top, the kind that one might wear at an elementary school birthday party. Taking hold of a hat, Mike immediately popped it on Bill's head and slid the elastic band over his chin.

This made Bill look fucking ridiculous; his sensible Henley clashed with the gold, and his hair stuck up in wild tufts off his scalp. He looked by turns embarrassed and pleased, self-deprecating and thrilled. "It's festive," he said, when Eddie raised an eyebrow at him. "Fuck you. Don't look at me."

Shaking his head, Eddie tried his best not to laugh at Bill, blushing and wearing a gold cap shaped like a waffle cone, because it was so clearly a gesture of love. He knew that Mike and Bill loved each other—Bill had told him so in the rambling, half-deranged email he'd sent before joining Mike on the road last spring, and of course they both demonstrated it whenever they were together—but Eddie liked watching that love take shape. Eddie had been out to himself for about thirty seconds, and as much as he loved Richie, Richie wasn't exactly at ease with his own sexuality; kissing straight dudes had done a number on him, as had some other things that he was telling Eddie about in fits and starts. Although Eddie would never, ever phrase it this way to Bill, they needed positive gay influences in their lives. Stan and Patty were an excellent template upon which to base their relationship, but Eddie was embracing the full spectrum of possibility here; he needed all the fucking help he could get.

"Party hat, Stan?" Mike said, proffering the Target bag, his expression misguidedly hopeful.

"I am not wearing a hat," Stan said dryly. But when Patty indicated that she might like to see him wearing a silly, conical gold-foil party hat, Stan immediately put one on. It sat crookedly atop his head, knocking his glasses askew; Patty looked _thrilled_. As she kissed Stan on the cheek, her own hat glanced a blow off Stan's like an extremely low-budget joust. Stan looked just as foolish in the hat as Bill did, but he, like Bill, seemed more than happy to sacrifice his dignity for the person he loved.

Eddie, observing closely, made a note to himself: _Whenever possible, give Richie whatever he wants._

In the end, Mike's enthusiasm was too infectious to resist—they all put on the hats. The elastic string cut into Eddie's chin, and Mike said he looked like a Keebler elf, but it _was_ festive. Eddie, it turned out, liked being festive, although he hadn't known this. He'd spent the previous New Year's Eve alone in his apartment, Googling pasta recipes he knew he'd never allow himself to try, waiting for Richie to text him _Happy New Year!_ from California. Which, he was now realizing, was slightly pathetic, but he was currently so happy it didn't seem to matter.

"So," Richie said, perching himself on the arm of Eddie's chair, sliding his hand across Eddie's back as he did so, "What are our New Year's resolutions? Come on, Big Bill, you start."

"Write another book, I guess," Bill said. "Sell it. Keep Mike in the style to which he is accustomed."

Mike laughed. Bill's hair had grown so long that the back of it brushed his collar, and Mike was amusing himself by toying with his curls. "The style to which I am accustomed," he said, "Is cleaning out the septic tank at National Parks."

"Gross!" Richie yelped. "Resolution, Mikey?"

Humming, Mike adopted a thoughtful expression. "Maybe get into yoga."

"For sex reasons?"

"Beep beep!" said Bill and Mike in unison; Richie, unrepentant, beamed and turned to Stan.

"Richie," Stan complained, "I didn't know I was supposed to write any resolutions."

"It's New Year's Eve, Stan! Of course you are." Richie, running hot like always, was a living space heater where he was curled up like a vine around Eddie's torso; Eddie pushed closer to him, trying to occupy the same space. His party hat got knocked off in the commotion and hung, limply, around his neck on its elastic, but Eddie didn't fix it. He was busy feeling light-headed with happiness about touching Richie, in front of all of their friends, while Stan hemmed and hawed and ignored Eddie attempting to climb inside Richie's skin.

"Alright, fine," Stan said at last, "See you all more."

"We've done two holidays in two months," Mike pointed out. "Can't do a whole lot better than that."

"What if we went to the beach this summer?" Patty suggested. "The Outer Banks, maybe, or Myrtle Beach—well, I guess that isn't fair to you three on the West Coast, but there's got to be a good middle ground."

Richie laughed again. Eddie had wormed his way so fully into Richie's orbit that his head was tucked beneath Richie's chin; when Richie laughed, Eddie could feel it vibrating down through his chest. "I bet Ben has connections," Richie said. "I bet that man's built a beach house big enough for eight before. Shit, why didn't we ask him earlier? Next person to talk to Ben and Bev, ask, okay?" Once they had all solemnly promised to remember to ask Ben, Richie fixed his attention on Patty. "Now Pats, you seem like a woman of resolve. What have you got for us?"

Once again, Patty's hand lifted, apparently unconsciously, to her stomach. "I think I'd like to learn crochet," she said, a smile playing around the corners of her mouth.

"No goals? No major aspirations? Goddamn it, people, where is your _ambition?"_ Richie moaned. "Eds, my darling, my pasta dinner. Tell me you have something big planned."

Normally Eddie's resolutions were things like, _diversify my investment portfolio. Eliminate refined sugar. Stop letting Myra get to me so much._ But not this year. This year, Eddie had a proposal and a transcontinental move planned, but those didn't feel like goals so much as golden, glorious opportunities. Shrugging, he said, "I don't know. I don't know how things could get better. I already have everything I want."

In response, Richie made a sound like he'd been struck in the stomach with a baseball bat, a soft _whuhhhhh_ as the air in his chest rushed out of him.

"How d'you feel about that one, Rich?" Stan said dryly.

"Well, I—I'm a big fan of the sentiment," Richie said, recovering quickly as always, "But I'm getting fucking tired of how insanely romantic you are every time I turn around, Eds. I look terrible in comparison."

He wasn't really upset—Eddie didn't think so anyway. His fingers were still curled loosely around Eddie's bad shoulder, and he was dragging his thumbnail against the seam of Eddie's stolen jacket. Plus, Richie always went soft-hearted when Eddie mentioned he was in love with him; for that reason, Eddie made a point to remind him at least once a day.

But just in case he _had_ shown him up, Eddie said, "Sorry for being happy, I guess? And since you obviously only asked because you want to tell us yours, go ahead, Rich. What's your resolution?"

"Oh," Richie said, waving the question away, "I never bother making them."

There was a general outburst of disbelief at that, but Richie didn't waver. He just sat there, his stubbled jaw tipped against the top of Eddie's head, stoically letting them heckle him for hypocrisy. They were so busy booing him that they might have missed midnight entirely had it not been for Mike, the only person keeping an eye on the time. "Alright, you guys," he said, "Come on, only like three minutes now!" 

There was barely enough time to pop the champagne. In the confusion, they lost the cork, but everyone ended up with a mismatched glass—Patty's was a tiny shot glass full of champagne, but the visual was so funny that the others didn't question it. At the minute mark, Richie hauled Eddie up by his right hand, and then the six of them went to stand by the railing, looking out over the city and the hills beyond.

"Thirty seconds now!" Mike said, his eye still on his watch. Eddie, shivering against the cold and busy holding both glasses of champagne, pushed back against Richie's chest; Richie took the hint and wrapped his arms around him, his chin placed as gently as a kiss against the crown of Eddie's head. On Eddie's right, Patty reached out and slipped her fingers through the crook of his elbow. "Twenty seconds!" Mike shouted.

It would be a good year. Eddie had no reason to believe this, objectively—objectively the world was subpar by almost every metric. But it would be. He could feel it. Bill was humming Auld Lang Syne tunelessly, but he was soon drowned out by a huge chorus of chanting: "Ten! Nine! Eight...!"

"Happy New Year, Loser's Club," Stan said, voice almost inaudible. Eddie laughed, and the wind caught the collar of his coat, and he felt like he was standing on the narrow edge of a screamingly high cliff but he didn't mind it—for maybe the first time since childhood, he felt brave enough to close his eyes and jump. 

"Four! Three! Two! _One!_ Happy New Year!"

Everyone in Los Angeles cheered, or laughed, or honked their car horns, or threw their hands overhead in celebration. The champagne was cold and sweet, even served out of a chipped china mug. Down at street level, someone had drunkenly picked up the tune of Auld Lang Syne, but Bill was too busy kissing Mike to join in. But Richie hummed along, his cheek against Eddie's temple. "Old acquaintances _better_ not be forgot," he mumbled, and then the stupid idiot chuckled at his own joke. And that was really the last straw for Eddie—spinning around, he yanked Richie down by the collar, shutting him up with a kiss.

A firework burst overhead, and then another. Even through his closed eyelids, Eddie could see everything—his friends, the roof deck, Los Angeles beyond it—lit up in gold.

+++

When the fireworks were over and the sulfur smell had blown away, the food packed up and the empty glassware collected and bundled back downstairs to Richie's kitchen, the trash bagged and Mike and Bill tucked into an Uber with a promise to meet up for lunch the following day, Richie locked the apartment door and put his hands on his hips. "Well. Another year over."

"A new one just begun," Eddie finished. Richie flashed him a pleased smile, but it cracked halfway through around a huge yawn. Amused, Eddie took him by the hand. "Come on, Rich. Let's go to bed."

They stopped at the guest room door to look in on Stan and Patty. Stan was in the bathroom but Patty stuck her head out and said, "Good night, and happy New Year's again. Stan and I will make breakfast in the morning, so you two can sleep in."

"No way," Richie said. "You're guests. Eddie can make breakfast."

Reflexively, Eddie said, "Fuck you, Richie," but there was an undeniable thrill to Richie implying he was not a guest. Eddie was something else. He didn't live here yet, but he would, someday soon. He imagined his clothes hanging in the closet, his toiletries cluttering up the single vanity in Richie's bathroom. Or maybe they would get a new place—a house, maybe. A bigger place. More guest rooms, so that all the Losers could come at once. Four guest rooms, even, so Stan and Patty could bring their kid.

It wasn't realistic, but Eddie gave himself permission to want it, anyway.

When Eddie closed the bedroom door, Richie immediately stripped his jeans off and collapsed onto the mattress. "I'm fucking beat," he said, "I'm so _old_ , I can't believe I used to party until four AM." Pushing up onto his elbows, he army-crawled to the far edge of the mattress, ceding Eddie the rest of the space. Eddie, feeling unbearably enamored of him, picked up his jeans and tossed them into the dirty clothes basket.

"You'd better come floss and brush your teeth if you're expecting me to kiss you goodnight," he said.

Whining, Richie struggled upright. "That's cruel, Eds," he said. His hair was flattened on one side and his glasses were askew and he looked ridiculous, but Eddie still thought he was the best thing he'd ever seen. "You're a cruel little man."

"Yes," Eddie agreed, "Now come brush your teeth."

When they had both taken their turn at the sink, they climbed into bed. Richie, as was his habit, slept on his stomach, limbs pulled in so close he resembled a torpedo. Eddie could not explain this quirk, but every time he saw Richie doing it, he lit up with a missed-stair feeling of absurd fondness. Plus, Richie's tactical smallness meant that Eddie could plaster himself to Richie like a barnacle in the night. Eddie, it turned out, was so clingy in his sleep that Richie usually had to peel him off in the morning. 

Mumbling, Richie wormed his way under the covers and shut his eyes as soon as his head hit the pillow. Meanwhile, Eddie sat up against the headboard, watching Richie settle into himself but making no move to follow suit.

Ever since Atlanta, Eddie had been having trouble falling asleep. Not for the usual reasons—not pain in his arm, or restlessness, or even the aches of being middle-aged. It was because he didn't want to miss a moment of being with Richie. It was a stupid urge, and it was wreaking havoc on his sleep cycle, but Eddie couldn't bring himself to care.

It was outrageous how much he enjoyed _looking_ at Richie. Staring at Richie was easily one of his favorite things to do; even when they were both awake, Eddie spent a lot of time admiring the big sharp angles of him and the smaller, softer curves. But being in bed with the person he loved, watching him mutter and twitch and fall asleep, was unsurpassable. Eddie wanted to stop strangers in the grocery store and say, _Have you tried sleeping next to the person you're in love with? Have you watched them flex their toes against the covers, or maybe even drool a little bit on the pillow? It's fucking good, isn't it?_

It seemed that while Eddie was privately rhapsodizing, Richie had already slipped into sleep—but then his squinty eye cracked open. "Hey. Come down here and cuddle me."

"Why? You're gonna pass out before I even lie down."

Richie's teeth gleamed white in the darkness. "'Cause I miss your bony elbows," he said. He started to reach out for Eddie but then said, quite matter-of-factly, "Oh, fuck. Just realized I forgot to take the trash out."

Instinctually, Eddie flinched, imagining the black bag of shrimp tails, paper plates and crumpled party hats reaching room temperature on Richie's kitchen floor. "We should go deal with it."

"Nah," Richie said, yawning, "It'll keep."

Sometimes, Eddie couldn't tell if Richie was being serious or not. This problem most often reared up when Eddie was being obsessively neurotic about something—and he was obsessively neurotic about a _lot_ of things, it turned out—but sometimes Richie would say something entirely at odds with Eddie's experience of the world. "But—it'll smell, Rich," he said. "It'll grow who the fuck knows what. That's basically the ideal breeding ground for bacteria, a wet plastic bag in a warm kitchen."

"Eddie. It's two in the morning."

It was. A little after, actually. Richie, expression sweet and vulnerable without his glasses, was making grabby hands for him, but Eddie felt the nagging pull of the E. coli no doubt percolating in the kitchen.

Rather than disappoint Richie, he split the difference. He let Richie tug him down onto the mattress, draping Eddie's limbs about his torso like a fur stole. Richie then curled up into himself and said, "G'night, Eds," voice soft and croaky with incoming sleep.

Eddie kissed the bare ridge of his shoulder. Then he settled into wait.

It took only minutes; Richie twitched slightly as he slid into unconsciousness, then lay still. Eddie slid out from behind him. He walked, very carefully, to the kitchen and retrieved the two black plastic garbage bags that were sitting by the fridge. Already a faint but rank smell of old seafood was emanating from the bags, but they weren't heavy; blessedly, Eddie could carry them both in his right hand. Gagging from the smell, he tiptoed out of the apartment, sliding Richie's keyring off the hook with his pinky finger as he went.

He had no idea where the dumpster was—he had only been in L.A. with Richie for a few days, they hadn't quite cracked the _where do you keep your municipal waste bins_ stage of the relationship—but Richie's apartment complex had a bright, modern lobby with a 24/7 desk attendant. When Eddie appeared at the desk bearing smelly garbage, the attendant immediately redirected him to the back of the building. He flung the trash into the dumpster, let himself back in with Richie's key, and was upstairs again in less than ten minutes. Richie would barely have had time to miss him, had he been awake. Extremely pleased with himself, Eddie placed a new Hefty bag into the garbage can before washing his hands and creeping back into bed.

Richie was just where Eddie had left him—all six-foot-something of him folded up and neatly stowed away on the left side of the bed. The sight of him, even just the blurry outline of him blunted by the darkness, made Eddie's chest rattle like a slot machine that had landed on the grand prize: he was coming up all cherries, all across the board. Grinning foolishly, Eddie lifted the covers and slid into place again, wriggling closer til his nose touched the little bump where Richie's neck met his spine.

"Eds?" Richie mumbled sleepily.

"Just me, Rich."

Richie snuffled. "You smell like lemons."

"I washed my hands," Eddie said, hoping to fall blissfully asleep now. Instead Richie made an inquisitive noise.

"In the kitchen?"

Ah. The lemon soap was in the kitchen—only the kitchen. Which Eddie should have thought about, but it turned out he was too distracted by love to clandestinely clean Richie's kitchen without incriminating himself.

Since there was nothing to say in his defense, Eddie said nothing.

Richie rolled over. Eddie, trying to keep his face from betraying him, looked into Richie's half-opened eyes with as blank an expression as he could. Unfortunately, this did not work. "Eddie," Richie said, voice as scratchy as a Brillo pad, "Did you take the trash out?"

"It was easy," Eddie said, and then pulled the blanket up to his chin, hoping to deflect further questions.

That didn't work either. Instead, Richie sat up slightly and searched first for his glasses, then the bedside lamp. "It's not about it being _easy._ Eddie, it's the middle of the night. You really didn't have to."

"I know. But I wanted it done."

The lamplight made a halo around Richie's head; his backlit expression was unreadable. "Well, you could have told me that."

"No," Eddie said. He closed his eyes.

"No?" Richie repeated.

Despite his better judgment, Eddie's stomach tightened into a knot. Richie wasn't mad—Richie wasn't even _annoyed_ , he was just sleepy and confused and curious. But Eddie did not want to talk about this; it was a holiday, and it had been perfect, and Eddie did not want to tarnish any part of it. "Richie, I'm not—it's just trash," he said. "I can do it, it's easy, I'm not gonna yell at you about the trash. This has been the best New Year's Eve of my life, I'm not gonna ruin it."

His eyes were still closed. He didn't know if he thought Richie was gullible enough to think he was sleeping or if he just hoped Richie would let it alone. For a long moment, it seemed like Richie _was_ going to leave it, but then Eddie felt the mattress creak underneath him, followed by an extremely unexpected _giggle._

His eyes flew open. "What?"

Richie tried, and failed, to adopt a solemn expression. "So," he said, "You remember on Thanksgiving, when you freaked out in the kitchen and then you were having a breakdown on the balcony and then you kissed me?"

"You kissed _me!"_

"Uh, not correct," Richie said, and he touched Eddie's face in the habitual way he had, setting the pads of his fingers against Eddie's jaw. "Don't get me wrong, Eds, I was about to, but you attacked me like a sexy little leech before I got the chance."

_"Don't_ call me a leech, dickhead," Eddie said. In his recollection, the details of who initiated were fuzzy—everything was indistinct in that memory, except for the white-hot need to get his mouth on Richie's. Eddie wished Richie would kiss him now; he did not want to talk about this. He _really_ didn't want to fight about this. It was Richie's kitchen, but if they'd left it overnight the whole apartment would stink. Eddie knew he was right, but he hadn't expected this to be an issue because he thought Richie would be _asleep._

Fucking hand soap.

Richie merely smiled softly down at him. "Come on Eds," he said. "I know there's something going on in that head of yours."

Normally Eddie loved that Richie cared about his feelings, but right now it was massively inconvenient. Flopping back onto the mattress, Eddie ran his hands down his face until his cheeks sagged. It was terrible for the skin's elasticity, but needs must. "I just—look," he said. "I don't want the trash to just sit there. I can do it, I did it, it's fine."

"If you tell me something is a big deal, I'll do it for you."

Eddie snorted. "I'm not gonna make you do chores in the middle of the night, Rich."

"Eddie," Richie said gently, "You can't _make_ me do anything."

Oh, yes he could. Eddie might have been smaller and, thanks to the nerve damage threaded through the left side of his body, weaker than Richie, but you could make people do anything if you screamed at them long enough; Eddie knew from experience.

In the intervening silence, while the new year was unfolding across the globe and Eddie was trying to put his thoughts into some semblance of an order, Richie reached for Eddie's left hand. In quiet moments, Richie would often pick up one of Eddie's hands and play with it, bending his fingers, turning his wrist back and forth. There were several likely reasons to explain this: Richie was tactile by nature; he tended to get bored in even short silences; Eddie was always there, available for him. But to Eddie, these gentle touches were wordless proof of the unspoken, automatic intimacy between them. Richie, who wandered around with hands in pockets and spine bowed inwards, who touched almost nobody if he could help it, touched _him._

"Listen, Eds," Richie said, lacing their pinkies together, "I've never been married but like, I'm pretty sure healthy communication is a big part of it."

"You think _I_ have any idea what a good marriage is supposed to look like?"

He had meant it as a joke, but Richie's expression dipped into sadness. But just for a moment—he covered it with a grin. "Let's just cheat off Stan's paper, then, okay? Do what he does."

Oh, he was way ahead of Richie there. But Stan had put on the party hat to make Patty happy; Eddie had taken the trash out so that Richie wouldn't have to. It was the same. Anything that Richie wanted, Eddie would give; anything Richie didn't want to do, Eddie would pick up the slack.

"I told you," he said, weaving all five fingers with Richie's til their palms lay flat, "It's fine. I don't mind taking it out."

"Sure, sure. But if you need the trash out before you can sleep, just tell me. I'll do it for you. You know why?"

"Why?" Eddie asked, although he was pretty sure he knew the reason.

And indeed, Richie's answer came as no surprise. Folding himself in half at the waist, Richie leaned down and brushed their mouths together. "Because I'm in love with you," he said.

When Richie retreated, Eddie reached up to touch his cheek. "That's lucky," he said, as he drew Richie's mouth back down to his, "Because I'm in love with you too."

Thank god Richie had brushed his teeth. Eddie loved kissing Richie so much that he wondered if he had been kissing people _wrong_ for the first forty-one years of his life. Richie's lips were always chapped, and his stubble sometimes left Eddie's mouth tender and abraded, but Eddie didn't care—it was good every time. His only real complaint was that the kiss wasn't very long; after only maybe a minute, Richie yawned directly into Eddie's face.

"Oh, shit. I have to stop kissing you," he said, sounding deeply regretful. "Not because I don't want to—but I'm gonna pass out directly into your face and crush you to death."

Eddie, who actually enjoyed Richie crushing him, resisted the urge to find that sexy. Instead, Eddie scooted out of the way so that Richie could lie down again. It _was_ late, after all, and the leftover adrenaline sparking along his nerves was no match for the warm bedcovers, the cool darkness and Richie's big, comforting castle wall of a body lulling him into sleep. 

But first. "I have one more thing to say," Eddie said, letting Richie wriggle around until he was comfortable again before pulling him back into his arms, "And then we can sleep."

"Hit me, Eds."

Smiling, Eddie pressed a kiss against Richie's trapezius muscle. "Thank you."

"For what?"

"For everything," he said, meaning _everything_. "You are the best thing that's ever happened to me."

Richie laughed, a low rumble that reminded Eddie of the trains that ran through Derry when they had been children. He patted Eddie's hand in the darkness, the cooler metal of his ring band brushing gently against Eddie's knuckle.

"Eddie my love," he whispered, "The feeling is mutual."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content warnings: discussions of sexuality, coming out and identity, as well as a brief mention of richie's internalized homophobia; pregnancy, having kids, and parental trauma; brief mention of child death and eddie's near death; eddie has some weird expectations about relationships/communication based on past abuse from myra.


	2. June 13, 2018

The first time Eddie brought Richie to meet Devon and Melissa, his friends had been star-struck. Speechless, actually. It had been the week before Christmas, and there was sleet on the sidewalks, and Richie, in an effort to be relatable, had worn a sweater with a reindeer on it. Devon and Melissa, slack-jawed, shook his hand and then sat across the booth from him in frozen, total silence, as if waiting for Richie to either say something outrageous or rob them at gunpoint.

Richie had borne this with unusual grace. He knew that Eddie was nervous, that Devon and Melissa and their good opinion were _important_ to him, so he had pulled out his A-game. He repeated a bunch of tawdry showbiz gossip and bought the first couple rounds. Eddie had sat there clutching the tabletop in fear until, two whiskey sours in, Melissa had snapped. "Okay," she said, shoving the drinks menu out of the way so that she drag Richie into the tractor beam of uninterrupted eye contact, "Explain it to me."

"Uh, Mel—" Devon said, his round face creased with alarm, but Melissa waved him off.

"I mean seriously, _what_ is a pre-fiancé. If you're _going_ to get married and you're already wearing the ring," she said, while Richie looked startled at the vehemence of her question, "How the fuck is that different from being engaged?"

"Actually, there is no difference," Richie said, "Except that it matters to Eddie."

"Hey!" Eddie said; Devon and Melissa, however, laughed.

After that, the shine was firmly off the apple. Richie Tozier might be a B-list comedian, a recent gay poster boy and a minor celebrity, but to Devon and Melissa, he was just Eddie's pre-fiancé.

Case in point: Devon slammed his beer onto the table, grimacing, and returned to the topic they had been talking about literally all day: "I cannot fucking _believe_ Ted's hanging around for another two months."

"Fucking Ted," Eddie agreed. Richie was sitting next to him, nursing a Tom Collins, texting someone. When the three of them got going on office politics, Richie would politely tune out and play with his phone. Since their terrible boss had just announced his retirement, effective at the end of the summer, they had been spiraling all evening; Richie hadn't spoken for at least half an hour. It was a beautiful June evening in the Big Apple, and they couldn't talk about anything other than Fucking Ted.

"Who retires in August?" Melissa said, rubbing her temples. They had gone straight to the bar from work; they had shed their suit jackets and Melissa had kicked her heels off somewhere underneath the high-top table. Richie, who'd been sight-seeing with Bev, had already opened a tab when they arrived. "He should have retired at the beginning of the summer so he can spend it golfing, instead of hanging around _just_ long enough to fuck us for the new fiscal year."

Eddie snorted. "He's gonna move to Florida so he can golf all winter while we're untangling his mess." 

"I can't believe you're not gonna take his job, Eddie," Devon said, for probably the hundredth time since they had gotten Ted's email.

"Fuck off," Eddie said mildly. Beside him, Richie looked up from his phone. "A stuffed shirt could do Ted's job, and you _know_ they'd never hire a replacement if they promoted from within. Like I'd do that to you guys."

They knew he was right; Eddie could see it in the brief, grudging glance they shared. But Devon persisted: "I can almost see it now: Eddie Kaspbrak, SVP." He spread his fingers wide in front of his flushed face, as if imagining Eddie's name on a marquee. "Would you make Work Drinks mandatory? Or cancel it altogether?"

"Why would I cancel Work Drinks?" Eddie said, bemused. He and Devon and Melissa usually skipped Work Drinks nowadays, preferring to go to their own biweekly happy hours, but it wasn't like Work Drinks was _bad_.

Richie, who had put his phone away in order to rejoin the conversation, tugged at the end of Eddie's loosened tie. "They seem to be implying you're no fun, Eds."

"I'm fun!" Eddie said, swatting Richie away.

"No, Eddie's fun," Melissa insisted, oblivious to Eddie's blush. "Remember when we spent that whole Saturday redoing the Brexit negotiations presentation?"

Richie's answering laugh was incredulous. "I know all you insurance people are fucking nerds, but there's no way that's your definition of _fun._ "

"No, but we made it fun," she said. "We ordered in Thai food and Eddie did like, rants on topics, we'd give him something to complain about and then he'd just, go off." Devon cackled, no doubt remembering how they had tricked Eddie into talking about the baseball Steroid Era for so long he'd actually gone hoarse. But Melissa's expression grew wistful, and she shook her head. "Eddie, we're going to go fucking crazy when you leave, dude."

Devon let out a soft groan. "We're going to have to be friends with Gen. Fucking _Gen,"_ he said, "Who cheaps out on the holiday tip to the custodial staff, every year!"

Beside him, Eddie sensed Richie was gearing up to say something, but then Melissa said, "Oh, speaking of holidays, Richie, I've been dying to ask, are you in that new movie with Jonah Hill, or is that just a rumor?"

Whatever Richie meant to say got lost—Richie had to explain that no, he _had_ been cast in that movie but then he'd been dropped for absolutely normal, non-homophobic scheduling reasons. The elaborate coming-out plan Richie's manager, Steve, had engineered had culminated in Richie's appearance and heartfelt statement on a podcast hosted by an old friend of his, one of the less appalling comics Richie knew. He had then spent most of the spring doing charity shows and raising money for LGBT causes. Although Richie had forbidden Eddie, in no uncertain terms, to listen to the podcast episode where he came out, Eddie had dutifully flown to Chicago, Miami and Las Vegas to see Richie perform. Well, not see: Eddie sat in the green room, waiting to be a solid rock for Richie to crash into at the end of the show.

All of this had been terrifying and anxiety-provoking, but it had worked: Richie still had a career. He had been roasted pretty viciously when the news broke, and featured in some truly unflattering memes, but three months later, his next tour was selling decently well and most of his celebrity friends had Tweeted nice messages of support. Most importantly, even at the lowest points of the process, Richie had never, not once, expressed a desire to return the ring to Eddie and slink off back to LA.

Eddie, on the other hand, had come out to exactly three people: Melissa, Devon, and his therapist. Richie complained that this wasn't fair, but he was the one who had chosen to be a celebrity and would have to live with it. What was less fair was that Eddie had cheated, both times, by skipping ahead to saying, "So, I'm in a relationship with Richie Tozier," and letting the obvious implication do the heavy lifting. His therapist had not been fooled by this evasive maneuver; Eddie had been forced to spend a month of sessions discussing this important change and its potential ramifications on his life. Things went better with Devon and Melissa, though. When he told them at that fateful lunch on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, the two of them had reacted with a lift of the eyebrow, a nod of the head. 

"Huh," Devon said, crunching a pickle spear between his teeth.

Eddie's stomach lurched. "What? Huh, what?"

"That's really cool, Eddie," Melissa said, with an earnestness that Eddie found absolutely, painfully disarming. Irritation melting out from under him like a glacier, Eddie had smiled and blushed. "Good for you, man!" she continued. "But also, how the fuck do you even _know_ the guy?"

"Seriously!" Devon said, and he slapped the table with an open palm, so hard the other lunch patrons turned and stared. Bashfully, he leaned in close, dropping his volume down to conspiratorial. "Tell us the fucking gossip, Kaspbrak, we gotta know how you bagged a celebrity when you barely even leave the office."

The celebrity thing was clearly the part they found most interesting. They did not linger on the fact that Eddie was dating a dude (although Melissa did later confide in him that her last breakup had been with a yoga teacher named Ella). They _did_ tell Eddie, point-blank, that it was weird that he was dating Richie Tozier, who they agreed was "fuckable." This infuriated Eddie, because he sensed that _fuckable_ was not quite the same as _blindingly hot,_ but overall he was very satisfied with their reaction. They were, he had decided, not just work friends but actual friends, and it mattered to him that they approved of Richie.

And Richie liked them too—whenever he was in town, he liked to tag along when Eddie went to hang out with them after work. "They're cool in a normie way," he said, after the first time he met them. "I mean, they're fucking nerds, but you're a nerd and I'm in love with you, so I guess I can deal." 

Unlike regular Work Drinks, which lasted a strict two hours, Eddie was willing to hang out with Melissa and Devon all evening. Drinks turned into dinner, which turned into another round of beers. Unfortunately, Devon, who had a baby and lived in New Jersey, had to make his excuses at nine-thirty sharp.

"You're in town for a while, right, Rich?" he said, fishing his jacket out of the pile where he and Eddie and Melissa had all tossed theirs. "Alexis really wants to meet you, it's just that she hates coming into the city when she's working early shifts."

"Here til the end of next week," Richie confirmed. "That'd be dope. Maybe we can come out and see you guys in Jersey?"

As hard as Eddie tried to keep the horrified expression off his face, he must not have managed it—all three of them burst out laughing at him.

The whole way back to Eddie's place, Richie wore his sunglasses and a hat pulled low over his forehead, the planes of his face flickering in and out of sharp relief as the train raced through tunnels—he didn't get photographed often, but Eddie couldn't fault him for being wary. Richie had also acquired a romantic habit of holding onto the subway safety bars so that Eddie didn't have to touch the disgusting metal; instead, Eddie held onto Richie. This stupid, inanely chivalrous gesture was one of the things Eddie missed most when Richie was in California or on the road. It wasn't even safe—frankly it was _more_ dangerous, Eddie had to clutch at Richie like a rock-climber when the train changed directions suddenly—but Eddie was so greedy for Richie's love, he'd take it all.

Apart from a few stray comments, Richie was quiet on the train. This reticence was unusual, but it made sense—he was probably tired. He'd flown in the day before, but he'd been pulling fourteen hour days taping some weird short movie in Palm Springs for the last week; probably he was just tired.

Eddie didn't push, and Richie didn't say anything as they entered his building and went up the narrow staircase. Eddie was tired too. The Ted bullshit was exhausting, as were his ongoing negotiations with the LA office. When he let them both in, Richie headed straight for the couch and fell face-first into the cushions without a word, which all but confirmed Eddie's suspicions. Richie must be exhausted, yet he'd still come out and hung out with Eddie's friends, just to make him happy.

"Sleepy?" Eddie said, tone fond. He hung his keys on the hook by the front door and shucked off his shoes. Behind him, Richie snorted.

"Why would you say that?"

"It's not a bad thing." From this angle, Eddie could only see the top of Richie's dark hair over the back of the sofa. "You've just been quiet."

"Yeah."

Eddie stripped his tie off, wincing when his deltoid muscle refused to cooperate. Folding the silk in half, he draped it on the kitchen island, next to the pile of baby presents waiting to be mailed to Atlanta. Stan had told him in no uncertain terms to stop sending the baby little Yankee hats and pinstriped blankets, but Eddie ignored him. He refused to be honorary uncle to a child brainwashed to root for the Braves—that was unconscionable. Besides, Patty was on his side. She liked the presents, and she had even promised to let Eddie be in charge of the baby's baseball-related education.

Behind him, Richie was moving around, doing something; Eddie couldn't see what. He took his jacket off next and folded it too. "You wanna have sex?" he called. "It's fine if you're too tired, we can shoot for a quickie in the morning if you'd rather. Or are you out of the honeymoon period if you have to ask that question? Do you have honeymoon periods if you're dating, or is that—Rich?"

The silence had gone on for so long that Eddie felt compelled to see what Richie was doing. And what Richie was doing was kneeling up on the sofa, facing the back of it, arms crossed and expression as closed-off as a bank vault.

"Rich?" Eddie said, startled.

Richie asked, "Why do your friends think you're leaving?"

"Oh," Eddie said. He lifted his right shoulder in a shrug. "I warned them I would be."

"You're leaving the company?"

"No, Rich. Just the office. I mean, I put some feelers out in LA," he admitted. He'd been fucking lazy about it, though. He knew the Los Angeles team would snap him up in a heartbeat, and Eddie hadn't wanted anything to stand in the way of him moving to be with Richie. "You know, in case any similar positions open up, one that wouldn't be _too_ much of a step down, but I— _what?"_

Richie's mouth was twisted into a frown. "So you're moving to LA. That's cool. Where you planning on living, Eds?"

Stung, Eddie said, "What, you _don't_ want me to move in with you?"

"No," Richie said flatly, "I don't."

"Okay, _fine._ Then I won't."

"No, it's not fine!" Richie yelled, shooting up off the sofa so abruptly that his feet almost went out from under him. They were fighting now: Eddie hadn't been sure before, but yeah, this was a fight. Richie was furious and Eddie was instantly, automatically defensive. "Stop giving me everything I want!"

"What? Is this reverse psychology? You just told me you don't wanna fucking live with me, and now _I'm_ the one who's out of line!"

"Eddie, that is _not_ what I'm saying," Richie said, even though he _was_. Him being pissed made Eddie pissed—or he thought he was pissed. His hands clenched at his sides and his heartbeat picked up and he was mad, unquestionably, at Richie for shouting at him, but there was a yawning pit of hurt mixed up in there, too. "But since _when_ are you moving to LA! And were you ever gonna tell me that, or what?!"

"I told you in Atlanta seven months ago, you fucking dick!"

"Oh, like _I'm_ the fucking dick here—" Richie started to snarl, but Eddie interrupted, hands raised.

"Stop it. I'm not fucking yelling at you," he said, and headed over to the bedroom. The bed-area, where his dresser stood. He started rifling through the drawers. "I'm going to the gym."

"It is ten-thirty," Richie said icily, "At night."

"So fucking what? I'm mad at you, and I don't want to yell at you, so I'm gonna go work out."

With that, Eddie took his workout clothes into the bathroom to change into them. On the other side of the door, Richie made an aggrieved, catlike noise in his throat. "The fuck am I supposed to do, huh?"

"Go see a movie, dickhead!"

"You're still fucking yelling at me!"

That was true. Eddie put his head against the mirror, forced himself to take deep breaths, and then unlocked the bathroom door. "Go see a movie, dickhead that I'm in love with. We can talk after."

Richie stared at him, but said nothing. Instead, he threw himself back down onto the sofa in a gesture of wordless frustration. "Have fun," he said.

Eddie did not bother dignifying that with a response; instead he let the front door slam closed, trusting Richie would catch his very subtle meaning.

+++

There was a basement gym in his apartment building. It wasn't much—three treadmills, some free weights and a rowing machine—but it was sufficient for his purposes. Eddie could crank the incline and power-walk to his heart's content. Which was exactly what he was doing, forty minutes after nearly losing his cool with Richie. The small TV anchored to the wall was playing CNN, muted and subtitled, and Eddie's headphones were piping gentle rain sounds into his ears. Eddie himself was walking up an endless slight slope, red-faced, sweaty, and apoplectic with fury.

It turned out that fighting with Richie _sucked_. This was not their first fight—their first real fight had been in March, over some extremely trivial bullshit that Eddie had forced himself to forget, lest it fester in his soul. Richie was deeply unpleasant when he was angry: he was by turns avoidant and mean, and he muttered cutting insults under his breath that he then refused to repeat. All of that was shitty, but the _worst_ part was how despicably tempted Eddie had been to yell at him.

Eddie refused, point-blank, to yell at Richie. Instead, he did this—he left. On the rare occasion that he was truly furious at Richie, he would end the conversation and go do something else. Usually a brisk walk, but once, on a long weekend in LA, he had stumbled into a paint-your-own-pottery store and ended up painting Mike a very ugly mug. His therapist had approved this plan, and Richie, grudgingly, had okayed it, despite his natural inclination to keep picking away at arguments until one or both of them exploded.

Eddie couldn't fight like that. He was terrified of the person he'd be once he exploded.

Fighting with Richie was the fucking pits. They argued constantly, but usually it was playful, light-hearted: Eddie would rant at Richie for forgetting to buy oat milk before he visited, and Richie would whine for days if Eddie talked over the crucial dialogue in _Tremors._ Normal shit. Eddie had assumed that if they fought, it would be like that—only over finances or mother-in-laws or whatever it was that normal people fought about. But this was not to be. It turned out he and Richie, despite being deeply in love, were pretty talented at driving each other batshit with rage.

Eddie's calves hurt. And his hip flexors, and his lower back—his physical therapist said he spent a lot of time tensing, to compensate for the never-ending ache in his arm and left shoulder, which sent pain rippling outwards throughout his entire body. It was after eleven at night and Eddie had three meetings tomorrow, including one with H.R. about transferring to Los Angeles, but since Richie apparently didn't want him to move to LA, maybe he should cancel that one right now.

Abruptly, Eddie slammed the treadmill power button off. The thought that Richie didn't want to move in with him—maybe Richie didn't want him at all anymore—made him feel like he'd face-planted into iron spikes. The treadmill motor wheezed itself to a stop, and Eddie, breathing hard, stopped as well.

The worst part was that he didn't understand why the _fuck_ Richie was angry. Normally, Eddie could work these things out on his own. At Thanksgiving, for example, he had clearly fucked up by having sex with Richie, running out on him, and then pretending to have food poisoning so as to avoid uncomfortable follow-up conversations. That was a very simple problem with a simple solution. Yes, it had been _difficult_ to admit that he was in love with Richie, first to himself and then to Richie, but he could at least see where he'd gone wrong. In contrast, this fight made him feel like he'd been handed an exam paper in a foreign language: clearly there was a problem here, but damned if Eddie could figure out what.

He realized, as a low itch broke out across his forehead and shoulders from the rivulets of sweat drying against his skin, that he'd been staring into space for at least five minutes. Swearing, he gingerly stepped down off the treadmill and dragged a towel across his face. "Fuck this," he said to the empty room. The muted CNN anchor nodded very seriously in answer.

He took his time on the stairs up to the apartment. His doctor had okayed up to an hour of light exercise at a time, and at this point Eddie was pushing it pretty close. Plus, he was forty-one years old—his knees sucked. To top it all off, by the time he made it to his own front door, he was sweating again. As he fumbled with his keys, Eddie half-hoped that Richie would be asleep already and they could delay the second half of this fight until morning.

No such luck, of course. When he opened the door, Richie was sitting cross-legged on the navy blue couch in the soft gray sweats he liked to sleep in. There was a copy of The Economist open on his lap. It was unclear if he was reading it or not, especially since he let it slip closed as soon as he heard the door creak open.

Richie turned to look at him; Eddie, feeling caught, stood like a cardboard cutout in the doorway. Then, very gently, he shut the door behind him. 

"Hey."

"Hi," Richie said.

It was as if he was repeating the last hour, when he had come in, walked over to the kitchen and taken off his tie, placing it on the counter next to the pile of presents. Instead of the silk tie, it was his headphones between his fingers; instead of content and sleepy, he was tightly wound despite the ache in his muscles. Either way, Richie stayed where he was, tracking his path across the room.

"You didn't go see a movie."

Richie shrugged. "Not a lot of great midnight showings on a Wednesday night, Eds."

That made sense. Eddie, stalling for time, just nodded, coiling the cord of his headphone around and around his fingers til his skin turned white.

A few months ago, his therapist had suggested that it would be helpful for him to keep a journal of his feelings so that he could practice experiencing his own emotions. Eddie was now, mortifyingly, a forty-one year old who had to write a weekly book report on himself, but he _still_ wasn't good at identifying what he was feeling. Right now, for instance, he was sweaty, and sore all over, and his stomach hurt and his chest ached and Richie was too far away and yet there was nowhere in the apartment Eddie could go where Richie couldn't look at him. He felt like he was trapped in a tiger enclosure, not standing in his own home.

It was a good little apartment. It really was—it wasn't spacious, but there was plenty of natural light and he'd grown fond of its eccentricities, like the awkward cupboard over the fridge or the electrical outlets six inches lower to the ground than expected. But Eddie had _never_ planned to stay here. After Eddie explained why love made him think of pine trees, Richie had gone straight out and purchased a huge picture frame with a dozen slots for photos—then he'd helped Eddie choose photos of the two of them to slide behind the glass panels. Together they'd hung it on the wall. The frame, with its cheerful faces and warm attendant memories, did make the place look homey, but it was no substitute for living with Richie. No substitute at all. 

"So, like," Eddie said, throat dry and words halting, "Do you not want me to move in with you _now,_ or is it like. Do you not want me, ever?"

He had meant to have more dignity than that, but, it turned out, Eddie was not a very dignified person. He was a little animal with the only-sparingly-used power of rational thought, and he was filled with simple, embarrassing desires. He wanted Richie to love him. He wanted Richie to live with him, to share the same electricity bill and renter's insurance policy, to sleep vertically in the same bed so that Eddie could twine himself around his body like a flower climbing up a trellis. If Richie didn't want him anymore, Eddie would respect that, but he couldn't change the way he felt. 

Richie, sighing, said, "Eddie. Come on." 

"What?"

"That's not the issue _at all,"_ Richie said. But he didn't get up and rush to Eddie's side—he just picked up the copy of The Economist and started to flip the pages so fast they buzzed against his thumb. "Just—when you were married last. Who made all the decisions, you or her."

"Her."

Richie's smile was as flat and featureless as a wooden plank. "Okay."

"Am I supposed to infer the rest of this argument?" Eddie said, confused and annoyed about it. There, that was a definitive emotion he could write down in his journal: _I get irritated when I don't know what the fuck Richie's talking about._

"Why the fuck do you think I want you to just go along with what I want for the rest of your life? Why would I want you as like—a passenger?"

"You think I'm a passenger?"

Eddie had genuinely been a passenger the last time he was married. He had often felt more like a carton of fruit than a real person: Myra put him places and told him what he ought to feel while he was there, and Eddie had obligingly done so. In contrast, Richie was sharing space in his cramped studio apartment because Eddie wanted him there. That was his _own_ feeling, no one else's.

Baffled, Eddie planted himself at the end of the sofa so that he could look at Richie's face. Richie, half-shielded by his magazine, continued to flick through its pages; there was no fucking way he was reading a single word, but he was clutching it so hard that the businessman on the front cover's face was waxy and distorted.

"Rich," Eddie said, "How can you think I'm a passenger?"

"Because you _love_ New York."

"Yeah?" he replied, more lost than ever. "And?"

_"Eddie!"_

"Richie, I truly don't know what the fuck we're arguing about," Eddie said. "I love you more than I love New York City." Maybe he did love New York, but he had also hated it for a while, and been apathetic about it for many years. In contrast, Eddie had loved Richie his whole entire life. Who gave a shit about New York? They had bagels in Los Angeles, didn't they?

But Richie took no comfort from this; instead, his mouth shriveled into a tiny, puckered frown. "Oh great, here we go, Eddie Kaspbrak's big sacrificial nobility complex, it comes out again—"

"What the _fuck_ are you talking about?"

This was the last straw for Richie. "I don't want to get what I want all time!" he shouted. "I want to give shit up for you, Eddie. You think I don't love you more than LA? Than this stupid career? Why are you the one who's always giving stuff up for me?"

Floored, Eddie stayed rooted to the spot, even as Richie, in a petulant move straight out of a movie, tossed the The Economist onto the coffee table. The motion was derisive, not violent, but either way, the magazine bounced off the polished surface and onto the floor; Richie, immediately shame-faced, swore and got down on his hands and knees to retrieve it.

For a brief moment, Eddie wanted to laugh. Richie's shirt was too big, so while he was crawling around under the table, it draped around his midsection, showing off a big slice of his pale white belly. Eddie was struck with competing, unhelpful urges to giggle and to bite the soft pudge of his stomach.

What he actually did was swallow against the sandpaper in his throat and say, "But I _want_ to give stuff up for you."

Sighing, Richie sat back on his heels. He leaned his crossed arms against the coffee table, the magazine slightly wadded up in his hand. "I know. But you're like a fucking wrecking ball, dude," he said. "I know you love me, and I know you're just trying to show it. But Eddie, sometimes I feel like you're trying to show me up."

It was very hard to hear that in any way other than the worst way. Eddie tightened his fingers against one another, until his whole left arm, wrist to shoulder, was on fire. "So what are you saying," he said slowly. "That... I love you too much?"

 _"No,"_ Richie said. He surprised Eddie by reaching across the sofa and grabbing his hand; Eddie almost snatched it away, but at the last second, he didn't. Richie's skin was warm, and he very gently coaxed Eddie's hand out of the balled-up fist it was trapped in. As always, it calmed Eddie down to feel the ring on Richie's finger. "I just—" Richie continued, searching for words. "I'm saying we're graded as a group."

"I know we are," Eddie said.

"Okay."

"I know that you love me. Richie," Eddie said, "I promise you I do."

Rather than reassure, this pronouncement made Richie drop his hands and sit back on his heels, his big sandbag thighs folded up flat and his toes curled up under his butt. He said nothing for a long time. "That's not what this is about. I just... want to love you more."

"But what does that _mean?"_

Richie sighed, but he didn't stay down on the floor. Abandoning his penitent pose, he stood up, every joint in his knees and back cracking. Then he tucked the issue of The Economist back onto the coffee table, its slightly crumpled cover model staring vacantly into space. "Let's figure it out in the morning, okay?" he said. "I mean, we can talk about this more, just please don't go into work and transfer to the LA office. Not yet."

Eddie nodded. "Okay."

Richie flicked a glance at him, and then he feinted one step closer before standing back, all the way down at the other end of the couch. "I wanna talk about this," he said. It was unclear who he aimed to convince, himself or Eddie. "Pretend you're Stan, and I'll pretend I'm gonna get off on a detailed, very list of pros and cons, okay?" He smiled weakly at his own joke. "Let me think about the rest."

Unfortunately Eddie had acted just the way he thought Stan would have, and he'd still ended up here: two islands separated by an ocean of couch.

"Okay," he said. He jerked his head towards the bathroom. "I'm gonna go shower."

Nodding, Richie said, "Okay. I'm going to go to bed then."

"Okay," Eddie said, and then he turned his back on Richie to get his pajamas from the chest of drawers.

It wasn't a silence—it was New York, it was never truly silent. Eddie could hear the pipes gurgling, muted conversations traveling through the walls, and then there was the low background heartbeat of traffic sounds. But it was quiet enough that the casters squeaked as Eddie pushed the drawer closed, and the gentle _click_ of wood tapping against wood was as loud as a car backfiring. Or something breaking.

It wasn't fucking broken. And if it was, then they could fix it. Maybe Eddie had fucked up really badly here, _really_ badly, but it wasn't like Richie was going to disappear back to California again. Richie had left him in the hospital because he was afraid, and Eddie was too much, too loud, too overwhelmingly, suffocatingly bad at loving him, but he wasn't frightening. At least, he didn't think he was.

He stopped at the bathroom door, pajamas clutched in his hand. "Hey, Rich?"

Richie, who was pulling the covers back, turned. He looked tired, like he was dreading whatever Eddie was about to say. "What's up, Eds."

"Nothing," Eddie said, "Just—good night."

"Good night," Richie said. He pasted a smile on his wan face. "We'll figure it out tomorrow, okay?"

"Okay," Eddie agreed, closing the bathroom door and endeavoring to believe him.

+++

Out of habit, Eddie showered in the morning. It was bad for the skin's horny layer—which was an honest-to-God scientific term, although Eddie had given up trying to convince Richie of that—to shower too frequently, but he slept very badly and had stumbled into the shower on autopilot. He was washing his hair when he realized this was his second hot shower in less than twelve hours; he swore, quietly and at length, but at that point it was too late to do anything but finish rinsing the suds from his scalp.

He felt: bad. Guilty. Unsure of what to do next. Unsure of what Richie was thinking. Unsure if Richie still wanted to marry him, and unsure how to begin to solve any of these problems.

He planned to sneak out without waking Richie, but when he stepped out of the shower, he was greeted by something very strange: the smell of coffee brewing. It was _possible_ he had set the pot to brew, but he didn't think so; he had tiptoed from the bed to the bathroom, trying very hard to be silent. Richie had _also_ slept badly last night. They hadn't talked again, still too raw from their last attempt at conversation, but Eddie could feel him tossing and turning all night long.

Gingerly, Eddie cracked the bathroom door open and peeked out. Richie was not in bed but had moved to the kitchen, where he was watching the coffee pot with bleary concentration. While Eddie gaped at him, Richie turned.

"Oh hey," he said, not commenting on Eddie's disembodied head sticking out the door to gawk at him. "Coffee's on. You want breakfast? I could make you scrambled eggs."

Eddie blinked at him. "I—sure."

Richie nodded. He looked exhausted, and he let out a jaw-cracking yawn, but he didn't say anything else—just turned to the fridge and started rifling through it for eggs.

Eddie shut the bathroom door once more. He finished drying himself off, shaved, dressed, brushed his hair and teeth, and then stood there like a coward, wondering what the hell was going on. He could smell eggs cooking now, possibly toast. As a general rule, Richie did not wake in time to see Eddie off to work, let alone make him a full breakfast. Usually, Richie would sit up enough to kiss Eddie goodbye and then fall asleep again before his head even touched the pillow. So why, the night after a fight so bad that Eddie had been up half the night obsessing over it, was Richie _cooking_ for him?

Eddie got out his phone and typed out a message to Ben: _If richie & I had a big fight and I was totally in the wrong but he woke up to make me breakfast, what does that mean?_

His theory was that Ben woke early and was moderately emotionally intelligent. At least the first half was quickly confirmed, because Ben responded, _? That he's in love with you?_

Well, how was _that_ helpful, Ben. Eddie knew that Richie was in love with him; Richie had told him enough times by now. But you could be in love and still furious. You could even be in love and decide that love was not worth it, that the indignities of marrying an emotionally illiterate, walking anxiety attack outweighed the perks. Bill had said that he and Audra had been in love, once—now Audra was in London, dating a minor member of the Royal Family, while Bill and Mike turned their LA backyard into a sustainable garden, complete with beehives. So Richie loving him was a useful data point, but not a fucking answer.

He texted Patty the same question. Schoolteachers woke early, didn't they? People who were eight and a half months pregnant definitely did—Patty texted him in the middle of the night at least once a week, complaining about heartburn.

 _What was the fight about?_ she wrote back.

An insightful question. Why hadn't Ben asked that? Eddie, feeling more foolish with each minute that he spent hiding in the bathroom, typed, _How he loves me and he wants to show it more and I don't let him._

Patty's response was swift. _Maybe he's making breakfast because he wants to show you._

When you put it like that, it seemed simple. But also insanely complicated, like a Rubik's cube with too many squares. It was one thing for Richie to ask him to stop smothering him with his love; it was quite another for Richie to pick today of all days to treat him with extra consideration and care. Unless Richie was _rewarding_ him for agreeing him to stop loving him too much?

Whatever the reason, he wouldn't find out hiding in the bathroom. And so, Eddie, gathering all his measly courage, cracked the door open.

On the other side of it, Richie was standing at the stove, humming quietly to himself as he made breakfast. He had the good frying-pan out, the copper one; the eggs were sizzling merrily in the pan. Because Richie was downright abysmal at cleaning as he went, the counter was covered in dirty knives and the cutting board and slivers of papery onion skin, but that didn't subtract from the gesture's overall effectiveness—Eddie's horrible, uncooperative heart had no choice but to vacillate wildly from guilt to happiness.

"Hey Eds," Richie said, as Eddie joined him in the kitchen. "Coffee?"

"Sure. Uh. You're making me breakfast."

Richie's mouth twitched. Shrugging, he slid the scrambled eggs onto a plate with a single, elegant flick of his wrist. "I didn't sleep great, either."

The toast popped; Richie pulled two crispy slices of gluten-free, sprouted bread free from the toaster. He himself was eating regular white bread with jelly, but for Eddie, he fetched down the almond butter. Then, tucking a folded napkin and a fork underneath the plate, he slid the whole thing across the island to Eddie. It looked devastatingly appetizing—the eggs cooked to crispy perfection, the almond butter spread paper-thin atop the toast.

Eddie ignored the plate; if he looked at it he would combust. "So you didn't sleep well, but you decided to wake up early and cook for me?"

"Are you mad that I did something _nice?"_

"No, not at all," Eddie said. He wasn't mad. There was guilt going slightly rotten in the back corner of his mind, but Eddie's main emotion appeared to be an endless reservoir of love. But that didn't mean that this made _sense._ "Rich, do you think you owe me? For leaving me in Derry?"

 _"No,_ " Richie said heavily. "I mean, I wish I could fucking take it back, believe me, but no. This has nothing to do with Derry. This has everything to do with how you're ready to move to California for me and I can't even cook breakfast without you checking for an ulterior motive."

The key turned in the lock—the Magic Eye picture leaped into focus—Eddie realized with a sudden burst of clarity that Richie did not know that breakfast was equivalent, if not superior, to moving to California. Richie was under the mistaken belief that he was _not doing enough for Eddie._

Which was just... ludicrously wrong.

Staggering under the weight of this insight, Eddie said in a rush, "I _don't_ think you have ulterior motives. It's just that I have very low standards."

In response, Richie fixed him with an incredulous stare.

"Eddie," he said, "What the actual fuck?"

He heard it as soon as he said it. Wincing, he shook his head and pointed at the bar stool next to him. "Sit down," he said, "And listen to me. You _know_ I never start out right."

For a moment, Richie looked like he might argue; then he tossed the spatula into the empty pan and slouched past Eddie over to the stool. "Does it get better from calling me ugly?" he said in a pissy little voice.

 _"Don't_ fucking start that with me, Rich, I don't have time to fuck some self-esteem into you, okay?"

Richie gave a reflexive jerk when Eddie said _fuck_ , but otherwise he continued to look, by turns, annoyed and nervous. When at last he was seated on the cracked leather barstool, Eddie took a deep breath and put one steadying hand on the counter. His brain was still the consistency of oatmeal in the wake of his abrupt realization that Richie felt _inadequate,_ not smothered, but he pushed past it as best he could.

"Listen, Rich," he said. "I have low standards for _me_. I let Myra terrorize me for a decade, and she wouldn't even let me do the fucking dishes. That's my baseline. You understand?"

"No," Richie said, but his voice was gentler than it had been.

"Okay, let me say it another way," Eddie said. "You are the first person in my entire life who has ever given a shit about my feelings. You listen to me. You touch the subway rail for me. You come hang out with my friends, and you make me breakfast when _I_ fuck up. And Rich, I never thought I'd get to wake up and go to my kitchen and just—be in love. Be happy."

For a long moment, Richie just stared at him. And then, quite suddenly, he abandoned the frown and the hunched shoulders and reached for Eddie's hands. His palms were clammy with sweat, but Eddie laced their fingers together anyway, without hesitation. "Fuck, Eddie. I get that, I do, I just—I want to give you everything."

"I know," Eddie said. He did know that. "But you already love me better than anybody ever has."

A pained noise escaped Richie's clenched jaw. "Sweetheart, the bar is not that high."

Eddie surprised himself by laughing. "That's fair," he admitted. "But Richie—I don't think you understand. You mean _everything_ to me. Moving to LA is not a sacrifice, not if that means we're together. If I'm a passenger, it's only because I would go anywhere with you!"

"Eddie, you insane little shithead," Richie said tenderly, squeezing his fingers, "I feel exactly the same way about you. I love you. I loved you and I knew it the whole time—even when I was clown-whammied, I knew I was looking for you. _I_ love you. Me." Richie swallowed so hard that Eddie heard it, like a cartoon character gulping as they fell off a cliff. "But every time I turn around you're doing something amazing for me and I never get the chance to do anything for you."

The amazing thing that Richie did for him, day in and day out, was to treat him like a person. Like someone whose feelings mattered. But Richie looked fierce yet scared, chin raised like he was facing down a firing squad. Eddie dimly suspected that that defiance was more for the voice inside Richie's head than for him, but either way. He never wanted Richie to look at him like that.

"I need you to know that's not true. Not to me," Eddie said. "But if that's how you feel, then, okay. We can figure it out." 

"Yeah," Richie said, shrugging. "It's how I feel. Embarrassingly, this is my first real relationship."

"Mine too."

 _"Ugh,"_ Richie said. He brought Eddie's hands to his forehead in a gesture of commingled irritation and affection. "I know what you're saying, but it's different for me, because I've never done this. At all."

Sighing, he leaned forward until his forehead came to a rest on Eddie's sternum. In answer, Eddie curled his fingers protectively around Richie's head. His hair was soft, despite its wildness and his terrible hairline. "I just—I don't want you to be here because I'm better than your terrible fucking ex-wife. I want you to be here because you want _me_ ," Riche said, voice small like he was admitting something terrible. "Because I'm good enough. Because I love you enough."

Eddie made a raw noise in his throat. This sweet, noble idiot. "Rich, you are good enough," he said, fitting his thumbs into the divots behind Richie's ears and tipping his face up. "God, you love me _more_ than enough, you moron. Whatever you want to give me, I want."

Maybe he was a wrecking ball. Eddie sure _felt_ like a wrecking ball, like he needed to smash blindly through the walls of the apartment and possibly all of lower Manhattan, a sleep-deprived Godzilla hopped up on love and Richie Tozier's scrambled eggs. But blunt-force romantic sacrifice was apparently not the way to go here. That was fine—he could be careful with Richie. Eddie knew how to be careful with the things that really mattered.

When Richie sat back, looked up at him and said, "Yeah? Whatever I want?", Eddie nodded. Richie nodded too. "Good. Then let me move to New York for you."

Eddie's first, instinctual reaction was to say, _no_. As was his second. He forced himself to do nothing but think it over, gnawing on his lip until it stung. "What happened to making a pros and cons list?"

"No," Richie said firmly. "You're going to talk me out of it. You're gonna have like, statistics, and reasons, but your friends are here and you don't even _like_ California."

That was a good guess, because Eddie had talked himself into being okay with it; he damn sure would have done the same to Richie. A part of him wanted to object and say that he liked California fine—and he did _like_ it. It wasn't home, but it wasn't objectionable and he was certain he could grow used to it, in time.

But Eddie was not the same person who had shown up to Atlanta with a ring and a half-baked plan to talk Richie into matrimony. Well, he _was,_ but he had changed. Between the therapy and the self-help books and the studying people like a relationship anthropologist, he had developed the tiniest, tenderest green shoots of emotional intelligence—for exactly this reason. If Richie wanted to do something big and meaningful for him, Eddie could get out of his way.

"Okay," he said. "I can do that."

Relief settled over Richie's shoulders, eyes shiny behind his giant lenses. "Thank you, Eddie."

"Do you—I mean," Eddie said nervously, then cleared his throat. "Can I still propose to you? You can say no."

"You're welcome to, because I know it's important to you. But, Eddie, as far as I'm concerned, we've been engaged since you gave me the ring."

Eddie shook his head. "No," he said, although it sort of hurt to say—he'd grown very attached to the idea over the last seven months. But he had only ever planned to propose because he thought the gesture would matter to Richie; if Richie didn't want it, Eddie wasn't going to impose. "You're right. Not necessary. Besides, Stan was already giving me a lot of shit."

"Why?"

"Oh." He shrugged, turning away to pull the forgotten plate of breakfast over. The eggs had cooled, but the toast was still good; Eddie took a bite before continuing, "I asked him if I could propose to you at Thanksgiving."

"What?"

"Yeah. I had this plan. We'd all be back in Atlanta, and we'd be at Stan's house. Because that's where we kissed and where we slept together and where you told me you loved me."

Riche surveyed him, head tilted. "You thought about all this?"

"Oh, yeah," Eddie said. He didn't mention that he'd dreamed it all up while they were still making out on Stan and Patty's deck, feverishly plotting the whole thing out even while he'd been sucking on Richie's tongue. He took another nonchalant bite of toast. "I'd get Stan to drag you out of the house—he'd make up some emergency or something—and then you'd come home and there'd be candles on the deck—well, I was thinking candles but Patty's worried about open flames so Ben said he could maybe make lanterns? And there'd be flowers all over the place, and, y'know, all our friends. And I'd be like, 'Hey, I need the ring back,' and then I'd get down on one knee and ask you."

Instead of laughing at Eddie's tender, fantastical daydreams, Richie leveled him with a steady, clear-eyed look that might have melted Eddie where he stood, had he not been busy eating toast. "I told you," Richie said slowly, "I'm not taking the ring off. Ever."

"Okay," Eddie said, shrugging. "Then I'd buy you another."

When Eddie at last looked up, Richie was half-smiling. Richie had two half-smiles, one of which was the same sardonic look that everyone had—a smirk he wore when someone was bullshitting him, or he was about to say something mean but hilarious that he'd later overthink and regret. The other only happened when he was trying to hide his happiness, his real smile tucked into the left corner of his mouth. He was wearing that second smile now. 

"Keep going," he said.

Eddie stared blankly at him, half-eaten slice of toast still in his hand. "With what, the toast?"

Richie's nasal laugh came out breathless, like he'd tried to hold it in but couldn't. He plucked the toast from Eddie's fingers. "With the proposal, dumbass. You were down on one knee. And there's flowers everywhere."

There would be flowers _everywhere._ Sunflowers and tulips and the white ones that looked like pats of whipped cream that Eddie had once picked up on a whim at a kiosk in LAX; Richie, enchanted, hadn't had the heart to throw them away, so Eddie bought him a new bouquet every single time he came to California. "Tons of flowers," he agreed. "But after that—I didn't plan a speech. I mean, I think about it all the time, but I can't decide what I'd say. Thank you, I guess. For loving me, and being patient with me. And that I don't regret anything—none of it, Richie. I'd do it all again, I'd get stabbed, I'd cook you shrimp, I'll even let you be the one to move here—that's how much I fucking love you."

Richie said nothing for a long moment. The half-smile had, like a river overflowing its banks, taken over his entire face.

"Eddie," he said, "I'd like to change my answer."

The horrendous, idiot freak that Eddie was in love with said this in a _game show host voice,_ which made Eddie so mad he almost overturned the plate of eggs and toast. And then the implication of his words filtered into Eddie's brain like depth charges, and his elbow slipped right off the counter.

"Richie," he said, heartbeat racing from the whiplash of going from apoplectic fury to love at ninety miles per hour, "Really, you want me to? Even though I just told you everything that's gonna happen?"

"Yeah, I fucking want that," Richie said. He touched Eddie's cheek, tracing over the little furrow of scar-tissue there. "I mean, everything else I said still counts. I'm moving here. You're gonna chill the fuck out and let me sacrifice for you, at least sometimes. But—Jesus, Eddie. That's the most romantic thing I've ever heard in my life."

He raised his left hand, too, framing Eddie's face in his cupped hands, and Eddie felt trapped in the only way he'd ever wanted to be. He moved just enough to press a delicate kiss to the base of Richie's ring finger, right over the gold band; Richie's pupils turned into cartoon hearts right in front of him.

"Wait," Eddie said urgently, because Richie was swaying into his space, lips parted, in a way that meant Eddie was about to be passionately, perhaps even recklessly, kissed. Richie, a flicker of shock replacing the hearts in his eyes, stopped cold. "So if you want me to propose, that means you agree," Eddie continued. "We're not engaged yet."

Richie tried to rearrange his face into a scowl, but it didn't work; his eyebrows were caught in the gravitational field of his huge, besotted smile. "Don't press your fucking luck, Kaspbrak."

"Kaspbrak-Tozier," Eddie said, delirious with happiness.

A gasp punched its way out of Richie's chest, and his hands tightened around Eddie's face. "Eddie, shut the fuck up."

Eddie grinned. "Tozier-Kaspbrak?"

"I'll take it under consideration, you romantic little nightmare," Richie promised, and this time, when Richie moved in close to kiss Eddie senseless, Eddie met him halfway there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content warning: discussions of coming out; mentions of eddie's injuries & chronic pain; pregnancy mention; myra's emotional abuse; richie's terrible self-worth affects his ability to make his needs and desires known.


	3. May 17, 2019

Eddie heard the sliding glass door open, but he made no move to get up. Instead, he continued just as he was, sitting on the deck steps, looking out across the sloping green lawn with its white picket fence beyond. June lay fast asleep in his arms.

Eddie liked sitting here. He liked June's warm, clean baby smell, mixing pleasantly with the warm, humid scent of grass on the evening air. The sun had only just touched down beneath the horizon, so there was still enough light to see the arch and the chairs and the wooden dancefloor, already laid out for tomorrow. Everything looked perfect—not quite finished, not yet, but just the way Richie had envisioned it.

He knew it was Richie behind him. He could tell by the sound of his weight shifting on the deck, by his quiet, contemplative silence. And when Richie settled, gently, on the step just behind Eddie, his big knees pressing lightly against Eddie's side, Eddie knew it was him even before Richie leaned forward to brush a kiss against his temple.

"Hey, you," he said. "You stole my baby."

Eddie smiled. "She jumped into my arms."

That was Richie's line—whenever he ran off with June, that was always his excuse. Richie laughed, delighted to hear his own joke used against him. "Came out for a moment alone?"

"Some quiet, more like," Eddie said. He slumped into Richie's space, and Richie put a steadying hand on his back. "It was getting hard to think in there."

"Yeah, they're all talking a mile a minute." His hand was so big and so strong that Eddie reclined into his cupped fingers and Richie, without issue, held him there. "So. What's a nice boy like you doing in a place like this?"

"Waiting for my fiancé," Eddie said. "Tall guy, very handsome, ugliest shoes you've ever seen in your life. Seen him around?"

This made Richie cackle; in turn, Eddie's chest bloomed with happiness. He still hadn't gotten tired of making Richie laugh. He didn't think he ever could.

It was the night before his wedding, and Eddie was, to his immense relief, not freaking out. Ever since the official proposal, he had carried a kernel of morbid fear that at the eleventh hour, his bravery would crumble into dust and he'd run screaming for the hills. A few times, this winter, he had even woken in a cold sweat, terrified that he was not marrying Richie but chaining him to an anchor.

Richie said that was fine—he had weird stress dreams too, sometimes. And the panic had faded as the wedding drew closer, thank God. He still felt a light undercurrent of nerves, but that was just because he had to stand up and recite vows while everyone important in their lives _looked_ at him. Also, the wedding would be the largest, most expensive party they'd ever throw. The logistics of it all made him jittery. Luckily, Stan had taken on a very large part of the planning. "Let this be my wedding present," he said, the day he created a master Google doc entitled, _Idiot Backyard Wedding_. "I'll help you plan it, and in exchange, _you_ host Thanksgiving next year."

Richie moved his arm, tucking Eddie into the crook of his elbow instead of the pads of his fingers. He stretched out too, his long legs in his soft, worn denim brushing against Eddie's bare knee. His Birkenstock sandals that Eddie _loathed_ clashed horribly with his candy-corn patterned socks; a tender throb of love pierced Eddie's side.

"Tell me what you're thinking about."

Smiling, Eddie nodded down at June. "Why's she so fucking cute, huh, Richie?"

"'Cause she looks like Stan. We could stick her in your bag, you know."

Tempting as it was, he shook his head. "There's gotta be a limit to the things Stan will do for us."

Stan was a wonderful, generous friend who had thrown his home open to them, _again,_ but he was an especially devoted father. He didn't hover, wasn't anxious, but even in the hospital, when June was just a pillowy meringue in a knitted cap, it was immediately apparent that Stan would die for her. It had been scrawled all over his exhausted, bleary face. And June had been so small, small enough that Richie could hold her in one hand, and Stan and Patty had gazed down at her in her little plastic baby-cradle, looking at her like she was the first baby that had ever been born: an unexpected, precious miracle.

In their defense, they were correct—June was a very good baby. Arguably the best baby. It seemed very strange that Eddie had been petrified when Patty had told him she was pregnant. June wasn't scary: she was bright-eyed and inquisitive, and she loved birds and yogurt and garbage trucks and pulling at Bev's shiny red hair. When the Losers were around, her feet never touched the floor; she was always on someone's hip, cradled against someone's chest. And she fell asleep so easily. She would just nod off, like a commuter on a train, instantly and fully asleep.

They were quiet for a few minutes, listening to the sounds of the others, still inside the house. The wedding wasn't fancy, but there were a lot of little things to do. When Eddie escaped, Stan had had everyone arranging flowers into bud vases. The white flowers that Eddie used to buy at LAX, it turned out, were called ranunculus; Stan and Patty's kitchen was presently so full of fluffy white and pink ranunculus blossoms that it looked like a cloudburst.

Beyond some posed photographs and a frightening credit card bill, Eddie had no real memories of his first wedding. But part of this had been because he had barely been involved in planning it. This time around, he was involved in everything. Richie was the decisionmaker, the one who had _opinions_ on things, but he always ran them by Eddie. "Tuxedoes?" he'd ask, on the phone with Stan, his feet in Eddie's lap while Eddie tried to watch spring training games. "Or suits?"

"Ambivalent," Eddie said, "But suits."

"Eddie says full white-tie," Richie said into the phone, smirking evilly, and then he yelped when Eddie slapped his upper thigh. "Okay, _fine_ , he actually says dressy-casual."

That Richie cared about his opinions continued to be surprising and sweetly devastating, but Eddie had also discovered that planning a wedding needn't be thankless; parts of it were downright fun. The cake-testing, for example—Eddie had eaten more cake in the last six months than the prior two decades. He and Richie had also spent weeks whittling down a list of songs for the DJ, which had overlapped with them trying to figure out how to dance without looking stupid. In the end, they had agreed that it would be best to sort of sway in place, but Eddie was fine with that. He was a simple man: he would be extremely happy to stand there, head on Richie's shoulder, hands in Richie's back pockets.

Richie, who never could sit still for long, pressed another fleeting kiss to Eddie's temple and said, "Hey. Have I mentioned I'm in love with you?"

"Once or twice."

"Good. Because I love you a ridiculous amount, Edward Kaspbrak. It might be a terminal case."

Eddie squinted at him. The full name made him fear the worst. "Did something happen?"

"Nope," he said, popping the plosive and getting spit on Eddie's sideburn. _Ew._ Eddie absently smeared his face against Richie's to get it off. "Everything is perfect. I spoke to the DJ, the caterer, the officiant. No problems there."

"Your parents?"

"Checked in at the hotel," Richie confirmed.

"The babysitter for tomorrow?"

"No issues, according to Patty."

Eddie searched his mental archives for more possible catastrophes. It was difficult, though; he was just too happy, which was occluding his normal capacity to worry. "Did Devon and Alexis's flight get in okay?"

"Oh, actually he texted you but I didn't open it. Hold on." Richie fumbled in his pocket for Eddie's cell phone; Patty had confiscated it from him earlier in the day, when his anxiety was at a roiling boil, and she'd told Richie not to return it until they landed in Italy for the honeymoon. Richie hummed as he opened the message. "Looks like he sent a picture of him at the hotel bar with—wait, is that my _dad?"_

Eddie immediately craned his neck to see. Devon, Alexis and Mr. and Mrs. Tozier, rendered in miniature, beamed up at him from the phone screen. They were sitting at the Marriott bar, Mr. Tozier holding a double shot glass of something brown and lethal-looking.

"There's Melissa and her new partner, too," Eddie said, nodding at the lefthand side of the image, where Melissa and Shelly's twin smiles were just visible. "Oh my god, your dad looks _plastered."_

"'Buying shots for the man of the hour,'" Richie read. He shook his head, amazed. "Oh my god. How did they even know he was my dad? What if he's hungover at my fucking wedding?"

"Tell them if they get my father-in-law too drunk to see, I'm never approving their leave requests again," Eddie said. In general he tried not to be a tyrant of a boss, but he wasn't above wielding his power a _little_ if it kept Richie's dad from spending their wedding day blindingly hungover. "He's got a big speech to give tomorrow."

Barking out a laugh, Richie typed something in response to Devon. Eddie suspected that he had gone off-script in the message—Richie, who had never pulled an eighteen-hour day with Devon and Melissa, treated them very nicely instead of like the shitheads they were. It was similar to how Eddie was always well-behaved around Steve, whereas Richie did things like call Steve up and say, "So I'm _actually_ engaged, as of this afternoon, and I'm getting married in Atlanta in six months. You'll be there obviously, so do you want chicken or fish for dinner?"

Richie had made this call to Steve immediately post-coital; Eddie had been in the hotel ensuite, scrubbing hooray-we're-engaged jizz off his thighs. Abandoning this as a lost cause, he came to the doorway to listen to the latter half of the phone call, his bare heels on tile and his toes on scratchy hotel carpet. Richie lay gloriously naked on the bed, the phone propped up next to his ear. Steve's tinny voice was rising to a truly alarming pitch, but Richie, still cross-eyed from being fucked into next year, ignored whatever he was saying and waggled his fingers at Eddie in a lazy little wave. _Hi,_ he'd mouthed, _I love you._

Then he said into the phone, "Steve, before we were pre-engaged, now we're regular engaged—there _is_ a difference, there's a whole extra fucking syllable in there for one—"

Eddie smiled just thinking about it. "Did Steve make it to the hotel, by the way?"

"Yep," Richie said as he pocketed Eddie's phone again, "Last time I talked to him he was getting a massage at the spa." He rolled his eyes, though Eddie wasn't sure why—a massage sounded nice. Had Eddie not scheduled each and every second of his wedding day, down to the minute, he might have been tempted to sneak a massage in.

There were stars hanging low in the sky. There were very rarely visible stars in Brooklyn, so Eddie tended to forget about them, but here in the suburbs, Eddie could see a handful of stars clinging to the orange line of the horizon. A mosquito buzzed, a high-pitched droning near his ear, but Eddie waved it away negligently, too lazy to swat it. His bad shoulder twinged; hissing through his teeth, Eddie adjusted June against his other side and reached up to rub uselessly at the sting.

Richie took over. His hands were bigger, stronger than Eddie's, and he didn't have a baby in his arms, either. "Gimme a feelings check, Eds."

Recently, Eddie had graduated from writing a book report on his feelings to merely rattling them off out loud—still humiliating, but less cumbersome. "Mostly happy," Eddie said, shrugging. "A little tired. Melancholy."

"Melancholy?"

"Yeah," Eddie said. Somewhere in the trees, a mourning dove was calling. "Not really, but—I wish that my dad was around. I wish we were twenty years younger. I wish this was my first wedding."

Richie nodded. "Well, it's your last."

"Yeah," Eddie said. Then he brightened. "Plus, tomorrow I get my ring."

This made Richie laugh so hard he had to slump backwards against the step, hand muffling his mouth lest he wake the baby. Eddie steadfastly ignored him, because it _wasn't_ funny. After the official engagement, Richie had mentioned getting him a ring of his own, but Eddie hadn't seen the need—he'd worn a ring on that finger for many years, and he still associated the lack of it with freedom from Myra. But as the wedding drew closer, Eddie's feelings about the ring changed from distant expectation to a gnawing, ravenous desire. By the first week in May, every time caught sight of his own bare hand, stubbornly bereft of a ring that Richie had given him, Eddie came that much closer to spontaneously combusting.

Richie, attempting to be sweet, had offered to give him his wedding ring early so he could start wearing it, but that wasn't what Eddie wanted. It wasn't a wedding ring unless Richie put it on his hand at their wedding; otherwise it was costume jewelry. The subtleties of this distinction were lost on Richie, who had ribbed him mercilessly ever since. But Eddie didn't care. He had waited very patiently, and now the waiting was almost over. Tonight was the last goddamn night on Earth that his ring finger would ever be bare again.

Richie, the dick, was still falling all over himself laughing, and Eddie was still ignoring him, when the sliding door rolled open. Then there came the heavy tread of boots on the deck.

"Hey. Baby stealer," said Bev.

"Hey, Bev," Eddie said. Bev tousled his hair, a move that was half-older sister, half-playground pest; then she smoothed it back down again so it wouldn't frizz up. "What do you want?"

"I'm here to bust you two. You're not supposed to see each other before the wedding."

Eddie bristled. "Says who?"

Part of the joy of having an informal, backyard, second wedding was that you could skip any dumb tradition you didn't feel like doing, and Eddie had _slammed_ the veto button on that one. He wasn't going to avoid Richie just to make seeing him again more special. Eddie had wasted enough time in his life missing Richie; no need to go adding more lost time to that pile.

"It's a losing battle, Bev," Ben said, smiling wryly as he stepped out through the door Bev had left open. He had a pink spray rose tucked behind his ear—Bev's handiwork, no doubt, probably lifted from her own bouquet. "You guys look cozy. She's out like a light, huh?"

He nodded down at June, who hadn't so much as twitched since Eddie had absconded with her half an hour ago. She had curled one of her fat baby fists in the collar of Eddie's shirt, but that was it.

Bev held her hands out. "Give."

"I'll bite you," Eddie warned.

"With a baby in your arms?" Bev said, but she didn't press the issue; she just plopped down next to Eddie on the steps. She wiggled June's socked foot, but very gently, not enough to wake her. Richie was right: June looked _just_ like Stan, with his dark curly hair, his nose, his heart-shaped face. But when she smiled she looked like Patty, although Eddie couldn't quite say how—just that she did.

Bev, once seated comfortably, tugged Ben down after her. Eddie hadn't really expected to have company out here, but it was nice, companionable even, to sit on the steps, listening to the birds chirping and the garlands of string lights clink gently in the breeze. The steps weren't all that comfortable, but they _were_ immaculately clean: Stan, with Eddie's help, had power-washed every inch of the deck last weekend, lest the wedding guests think he was the kind of man who owned an unscrubbed deck. Patty and Richie had not taken part in the power-washing, but they _had_ made a big show of ogling them from the sliding-glass door as they worked. It had been embarrassing, but strangely gratifying, too.

Bev's mind, however, was not on the hardwood steps or their impeccable cleanliness. A grin creeping along her face, she said, "You know what this reminds me of? Thanksgiving."

"Which one?" Richie said.

"The first one. We were sitting on this deck, watching you guys play football, when Richie, you came over and held Eddie's hands. Remember that?"

Eddie _did_ remember that; he remembered his brain evaporating while Bev sat there smoking, ignoring his plight. He also remembered how it felt to have Richie's huge catcher's mitt hands holding his own, so delicately. Richie, less affectionate, retorted, "Yeah, because Eddie was _staring_ at me all morning."

"No I wasn't!"

"You kinda were," Ben said, shrugging.

"You were so panicked when he grabbed your hands," Bev recalled, tilting her way into Ben's embrace just like Eddie was doing to Richie, except she was smiling smugly and Eddie was glaring daggers at her over the top of June's head. "Eddie, you were totally losing your shit."

"I didn't—look," Eddie said, heated. "I was trying to figure out how to propose and Richie comes over here and just starts _holding_ my _hands."_

Ben, despite his sweet nature, was capable of devastating, wordless glances. He made one now, aimed at Richie's hand where it was securely fastened around Eddie's midriff, the ring on his finger glinting even in the fading twilight. "Looks like you figured it out, Eddie."

"I _really_ can't believe you guys managed to wait this long," said Bev.

If Eddie had a nickel for everyone who'd said that to him, they could have rented out Yankee Stadium and held the wedding at home plate. Could have gotten Derek Jeter to be the minister, too. "I waited a year. Just like Stan told me, just like I said I was going to."

"You pre-proposed after literally one night, though."

"What can I say?" Richie said smugly, "I'm just that good."

Behind them, there came an unexpected laugh, light and high-pitched. It was Bill, who'd let himself out onto the deck, Mike hot on his heels. Still chuckling, Bill hit an exterior lightswitch, and all the string lights that Patty and Ben and Richie had painstakingly hung around the deck and garden burst into life. "Perfect timing as usual, Richie," he said.

"Oh, hey Bill, Mike," Bev said, unfurling an arm to wave them down to join the party already in progress, "Come join us, boys. We're just sitting here reminiscing about Thanksgivings past."

They settled at the top of the stairs, Bill in front and Mike curling up around him, chin on the top of Bill's head; the string lights speckled their faces with soft light. "The proposal or the fake proposal? Oh, we _know,_ Eddie," Bill said, foreclosing the argument that was on the tip of Eddie's tongue, "It wasn't a proposal. But somebody got a ring out of the deal, didn't they?"

"And then you re-used the same ring for the actual proposal," Mike said sadly. He shook his head, jostling Bill underneath him. "Tacky."

"No, I like my ring," said Richie. He sure did—true to his word, he had never taken it off. This drove Eddie to distraction, because it _still_ didn't quite fit, but Richie was inflexible on this point. "Eddie offered to buy me another, I said no."

"I did buy you another," Eddie reminded him. Richie regarded him blankly until Eddie rolled his eyes. "Your _wedding ring,_ Rich."

"Right, that."

Ben laughed. "It's a good thing Stan's in charge of the rings for tomorrow."

"No, Patty has the rings," Bill said, "You _know_ Stan's pockets are gonna be full of Kleenex."

This was true—Stan had chosen a suit with deep pockets for just that reason—but Richie huffed with indignation. "Why don't you all go fuck yourselves?" he said, giving Bill's foot a good shove that sent him exactly nowhere. "Unlike _some_ of you, I have to get up and read vows in front of everyone, and meanwhile Eddie's gonna say something insanely romantic and wreck my shit the minute he looks at me with those Kewpie doll eyes."

Bev very sweetly patted Richie on the knee. "Richie, you're gonna cry the moment the music starts playing, don't even try."

"Should have eloped, like we did," Mike said smugly.

"Absolutely no fucking way," Richie said. "I waited thirty goddamn years for this. If you think I wasn't going to have the whole world watch me marry Eddie Kaspbrak, you're outta your mind."

He squeezed Eddie's bicep, as if to underline his point. Eddie turned and smiled softly at him. Privately, he wouldn't have minded eloping—all the pictures from Bill and Mike's barefoot, beachfront wedding in Hawaii seemed tranquil and low-fuss—but Richie wanted a medium amount of fuss. He wanted a cake, and a band, and flower arrangements, and he wanted their friends and his parents in attendance. Beyond that, he was fine with whatever. And while Eddie's only stipulations were that the ceremony ended with Richie permanently stuck with him, til death did them part, he still wanted Richie to have everything he wanted.

Besides, Richie had been right: having a wedding was good. Bill and Mike had eloped, and Ben and Bev had decided to remain joyfully unmarried, whereas Patty and Stan's wedding twenty years ago had been right in the middle of their collective amnesia. Consequently, the wedding sometimes felt like everyone's wedding—it was Richie's show, first and foremost, but the others had all put a hand to the planning. Ben had built the arch that they'd be married under, as well as the dozens of lanterns that had illuminated the deck last Thanksgiving during Eddie's official proposal; they were reusing them for the dancefloor tomorrow, too. Bill and Mike had selected the poems they would read at the ceremony. Bev had lent her discerning eye to both the outfits and the décor. Stan, meanwhile, had basically planned every inch of the wedding with Richie. The two of them had spent many long weekends huddled together over the kitchen island, making important decisions on invitations and caterers, while Patty and Eddie drank wine on the couch and scrutinized the vendor contracts line-by-line.

"Sometimes," Mike said, and his voice was less teasing now, "I think it's so crazy that things turned out this way. And other times I think back to Derry and I'm like, _of course_ this makes sense. Of course we're all here, at your wedding, in Atlanta."

"Bullshit. No way you thought any of us would end up in Atlanta," Richie responded, earning a laugh from the others. " _I_ still don't know why Stan and Patty live here."

But Eddie did—Eddie remembered the conversation he, Bev and Stan had had in the kitchen on Blackout Wednesday. "It was a compromise, actually. Patty wanted to move to Palm Beach."

"Why do you _know_ that?"

"Patty tells me things!" Eddie responded, hitching June up a little higher in his agitation; she gurgled in her sleep but didn't stir. "We talk about stuff. Maybe if you ever let anyone get a word in, Richie—"

"Uh, Eds, you're the one who _never_ shuts up!"

"I think it's both," Bev said, as if Eddie and Richie weren't having one of their thrice-daily squabbles at the bottom of the steps. "It _is_ unbelievable that we're here. But it also makes perfect sense."

"Yeah," Bill said, nodding down at two of them—still arguing—with a smile on his face. "I mean, who else would tolerate either of them?"

Argument instantly abandoned, Eddie turned around to glare fiercely at Bill; Richie did the same, eyebrows furrowed with rage. "Bill, you're out of the wedding," Eddie said. "Take your poem and beat it, fuck-face."

At this, Bill visibly drooped. "You don't mean that. It's Mary Oliver!"

No, Eddie didn't mean it—the part about Bill, that was, because he still knew nothing about poetry and was trusting Bill and Mike to have picked nice poems for the ceremony. But Eddie was glad they were all together. Bill, despite his insistence on emailing Eddie helpful websites, really was like an older brother to him. And Mike was Mike—absurdly good, and kind, and wickedly funny and the only person who could keep Bill in line. When Bill and Mike eloped, Bill had emailed Eddie in anguish: _We just wanted something for ourselves,_ he'd written, _otherwise of course I would have wanted you beside me._ Eddie understood, though. Compromise was important, after all. What worked for them didn't have to be the exact same thing that worked for him and Richie—wasn't that what Stan was always saying?

But Eddie was glad that they had had a big wedding with everyone together. Soon after proposing, when he and Richie had been trying to nail down a date, he had emailed the others to check if they had scheduling conflicts for mid-May; he had been absurdly touched when they all emailed back that they would obviously reschedule any conflict. Even Bev, whose new ready-to-wear collection was the talk of the industry, had responded, _Any date, you know I'm there. Wouldn't miss it for anything._

That was what families did. They showed up at your wedding. They rescheduled their industry parties and book-tour dates and flew to Atlanta. They burned their frequent flyer miles for you. They sat in the kitchen, stuffing fluffy pink ranunculus into the tiny bud vases that they had picked out at thrift shops and old estate sales, each one mismatched and yet beautiful in its own, strange way.

The conversation had moved onto the music for the reception when, for the fourth time since Eddie had come outside, the door behind slid open. The six of them turned, blinking up at the twin figures standing in the lit doorway. "Oh, _there_ you are," Stan said breezily, taking Patty's hand and escorting her over the half-inch threshold onto the deck. "I've been looking for my daughter everywhere."

"Hi Patty," Richie said loudly, as if Stan had not spoken. Smiling, she and her husband both picked their way between the mess of outstretched legs and dangling arms, down the deck stairs until they reached the bottom.

"Hi Richie," she said. "Don't you two look sweet together."

Eddie felt sweet, with Richie holding him snugly and baby June snuffling into the collar of his shirt. Stan, however, perhaps feeling less sentimental, frowned down at him. "Hand the baby over."

Eddie was not cowed by the stern expression on Stan's face; on the contrary, he grinned. "Baby who, Stan?"

"You're not _serious,"_ Stan said.

"Stan," Richie said, in the wheedling tones he'd been using for more than a year to get Stan to fulfill his every wish, "I think it's very important that you say it. As a wedding present."

Stan's eyes rolled heavenward, but with a sigh of enormous suffering, he said, "Give Junior to me."

A glow of contented smugness settled in Eddie's stomach, so potent he could power a city block. "I knew we'd break you."

June was of course not her real name—her real name was Emily Blum-Uris, but Richie had dubbed her "Junior" well before she was born. The nickname had been a placeholder at first, but Stan and Patty had dithered over her first name for ages. In the end, her parents didn't choose her name until she was four days old, at which point every Loser had already visited her and picked up the habit of calling her Junior. Stan had expressed hope that they would stop referring to her as Junior now that she actually had a name, but Richie merely truncated it to "June," which was even _more_ adorable. The nickname had stuck.

Shaking his head, Stan accepted baby June from Eddie's arms and settled her on his shoulder, her chubby cannoli fists tucked under her chin. "I let you get pre-engaged, engaged, _and_ married at my house, and now you make me call my baby your dumb nickname."

"Patty likes June!" said Richie.

"I do," Patty said warmly, one hand on Stan's lower back, the other smoothing down June's curls. "I think it's sweet. She's probably the only baby in the world with six namesakes."

Stan sighed, but he didn't disagree. Instead, he shifted June higher up his shoulder, cooing softly to her, just in case she startled or fussed. Their hair was _so_ similar, Eddie realized, that in the soft amber light of the string lights, it wasn't clear where Stan's began and June's started. When he turned, though, and caught the light still streaming out from the kitchen, you could see silver at his temples. He wore his age as comfortably as fatherhood, though—he looked happy. He looked _right,_ standing there with Patty's hands on his back and their daughter in his arms. It was just as Bev had said: impossible yet perfectly obvious, both at once.

Bereft without a baby to hold, Eddie took both of Richie's hands in his and crossed them over his chest, effectively turning Richie into a jacket. Meanwhile, Patty said, "So! What were we talking about?"

Before Stan and Patty's arrival, they had been debating whether _Jessie's Girl_ was high art or just a crowd-pleaser, but rather than pick up the thread of that argument, Bill said easily, "What's the over-under for how many minutes into the ceremony Richie starts bawling?"

Without appearing to think about it all, she said confidently, "Two."

"Patty! Have a little faith!"

"Sorry, Richie," she said, and she sank down onto the step next to Bev, who curled an arm companionably around her, "But I'm not a sucker."

Richie whined. "Can we please go back to making fun of Eddie?"

"You make fun of me all the time, asshole! You were _just_ fucking laughing at me for being excited about my wedding ring!"

"And yet," said Stan dryly, "You still want to marry him so badly."

Eddie was surrounded on all sides by traitors. "Fuck off," he said, slumping backward into Richie's chest so that he could pout more effectively, "All of you."

Up on the top step, Mike laughed his deep, charming laugh. "Eddie, remember when you got drunk at Applebee's and you were half in Richie's lap? And then he went to get you a drink and you just immediately followed him over to the bar?"

Of course Eddie remembered. He remembered cozying up to Richie and putting his hands all over his watchband and then miserably storming back to the hotel because some bartender had so much as _looked_ at Richie. Incredibly, it had taken him two more days to realize he was in love. It was a wonder the others could stand him—he really had been a nightmare that whole vacation.

"Personally," Bev said, " _I_ thought it was really funny when you and Eddie and Bill had that super secret hangover nap upstairs, and Richie was trying to think of _any_ excuse to come talk to Eddie."

This was news to Eddie; he spun around to look at Richie, who had suddenly become extremely interested in the woodgrain of the deck steps. "You _what?"_ Eddie demanded.

"Ohhh," Bev drawled, laying a theatrical hand upon her collarbone as she reminisced, "He was like, 'Can I carry that upstairs? Anyone need anything from upstairs? Guys, what was the name of our fourth grade teacher, I should just run upstairs and ask Eddie real fast.'"

"Oh, fuck off! I was jealous, so what!" Richie said. He had gone pink all over, from the tops of his cheeks to the open triangle of skin at his collarbone. "You practically climbed inside my _shirt_ at Applebee's, disappeared, and then you immediately fucked off to have a threeway nap with Mike and Bill."

"Meanwhile Bill was trying to convince Eddie to get into gardening and forget all about you," said Mike, grinning broadly. Bill, still tucked up under his chin, huffed out an exasperated sigh.

"That is the most tired fucking joke," he said.

"No, making fun of your shitty endings is," Richie shot back, "Zing!"

Eddie laughed, but he kept looking at Richie. When Richie noticed this, he gave Eddie a funny little self-conscious smile. "What?"

"Nothing," Eddie said, "I just—I love you so much."

As usual, that cracked Richie like an egg; Eddie could even feel his spine soften as the same words that Richie heard every single day (multiple times!) unspooled him. "Good," he said, tipping his head against Eddie's, the cold tip of his nose brushing against Eddie's cheek, "Otherwise it's gonna be real fucking awkward tomorrow when I get up in front of everyone and tell you how much I love you."

"Now that brings up a good point," Stan said. An evil gleam had appeared in his eyes, quite at odds with the way he was still tenderly cradling June against his shoulder. "Let's figure out the odds for the real question: will _Eddie_ cry tomorrow."

"Yes," voted Bill.

Outraged, Eddie said, "No! I'm gonna be happy."

"You're gonna be crying so hard you'll forget your choreography," Bev predicted. This made Ben sigh, a martyred expression on his face.

"I hope not," he said. "Eddie made me practice for like, an hour last night."

"You offered, you fucking drama queen," Eddie said snippily. In truth, Eddie had made Ben practice the four-minute dance routine for closer to two hours, but he was not about to say that in front of these jackals.

"Hmm," Patty said, in that teacher tone of voice that meant that she would now be redirecting the conversation now; Eddie felt an ancient urge to sit up straight and pay attention. But Patty just slanted Richie a meaningful look and said, "You know what I think we should do now? Richie?"

A brief, wordless conversation passed between them, and then Richie, sighing, untangled himself from Eddie's torso. "Oh. Yeah, okay," he said, and then, "Hold on just a second, Eds," when Eddie made an irritated noise at the sudden lack of Richie's reassuring, aimless touch. Richie stood, sighing with pain from the hard step under his ass, and went inside; he left the sliding glass door open and was back a minute later. Yanking it shut after him, he said, "You know, I was planning on giving it to him _before_ all you fuckers showed up anyway."

"What? You got me a present? Richie," Eddie said, admonishing him even as Richie floated down the steps, something wrapped in bright yellow paper clutched in his hands. "You're already giving me the best gift in the world tomorrow."

"Oh my god, _shut up,"_ he replied. "You proposed to me, twice, so I got you something. Sue me." He did not sit down with Eddie but instead stood just in front of him, hands outstretched to offer him the gift. It was bigger than a dinner plate but not by much; the paper was beautifully crisp, the white ribbon perfectly tied. Eddie, mystified, accepted it.

"It's a book?" he said, shaking it gently. He could tell it was a book—he could feel the slight rigidity of the spine. Skeptically, he raised an eyebrow even as he untied the ribbon. "It's not one of Bill's, is it?"

Behind him, Bill said, "Hey!"

But Richie just smiled, fidgeting slightly, hands in his pockets. "No, it's not one of Bill's. I mean, Bill helped. Everyone helped. But it's... It's for you, Eddie."

They were all looking at him; Eddie could feel them staring. Apparently they knew what was coming. Stan, standing just to Richie's side with June still in his arms, touched Richie's shoulder, which made a reflexive bolt of panic lance through Eddie's chest. But Richie wasn't afraid. Richie was watching him, expression so openly full of love that Eddie was glad that the others were looking at _him_ —he was the only person who should get to see that look on Richie's face.

Ducking over the gift, Eddie ripped into the yellow giftwrap. It _was_ a book, but it wasn't a novel; Eddie peeled the paper away to reveal a hardback photo album, with abstract spiky triangles embossed into the dark green leather cover. Something sweet and sentimental bloomed inside of him as he opened the first page and saw the pictures they'd taken in Stan and Patty's living room the day of the not-proposal. There they all were, crowded onto the couch, blue fingernails and the flash of gold on Richie's finger.

"Oh, wow," Eddie said faintly.

He looked up. Richie nodded. "Keep going."

He turned the page and there they were in New York at Christmas, in LA on New Year's, on the beach last summer, Eddie ghostly pale under sunscreen and Richie's nose burned lobster-red. Richie and the moving van in front of their new place in Brooklyn, Richie mid-jump among the mountains of brown moving boxes. Eddie at Dodgers Stadium, defiantly wearing a Jeter jersey; Eddie and Devon and Melissa at the bar to celebrate his promotion; Eddie, white-faced and terrified, as he held June for the very first time in Patty's hospital room, Richie peering over his shoulder to gaze down at her tiny, wrinkled, perfect face.

And then he flipped the page and the face looking up at him was his own, thirty-five years younger. Eddie _gasped;_ it was him and Bill, no more than five or six, their backpacks as big as they were. "How did you—oh my god," Eddie said. The next page was Stan and Richie and Eddie at some elementary school event, all three of them looking bored and sullen and heartbreakingly small. Chest aching, Eddie kept flipping. "How did you—Richie, _how?_ "

"A lot of it was Mike."

"I still have friends in Derry," Mike explained. "They helped me track down class photos, school newspapers, that kind of thing."

"We checked our family albums too," Ben said. "My mom had a lot."

"So did mine," Bill said softly.

There were so many pictures, pictures Eddie had never seen or else had forgotten about entirely. His high school graduation photo, side by side with Richie's, taken states apart but finally reunited. Seven of them gathered around Eddie sitting upright in Derry Hospital, still sporting a nasal cannula. Teenaged Bev, flipping off the camera, her arms hooked around younger versions of Ben and Richie. Eddie in college wearing a suit and tie, Eddie at Stan's house one childhood Halloween, Eddie and Richie passed out in the hammock at the beach house after a long sunny day. In that photo, the scar on Eddie's chest was partially visible, partially covered by Richie's arm slung over him, and Eddie was smiling in his sleep, his head on Richie's shoulder. Richie's ring glinted where it caught the sunlight, his hand possessively curled around Eddie's waist.

He kept turning the pages, unable to stop. There were pictures of Derry, but only the best parts of Derry, like gold carefully sifted from muddy silt. There was one of him and Bill sitting on the Denborough family couch, a tiny fluffy baby who must have been Georgie in Bill's arms; Eddie, biting back a sound, covered his mouth with his hand. Someone behind him touched his back, although he didn't even know who. There was even a faded photo, grainy with age, of a smiling young man with Eddie's large, dark eyes, a small child even younger than June sleeping peacefully in his arms, and Eddie knew that he was looking at his father.

"How?" he croaked, hand hovering over the photo, terrified to even touch it.

"Um," Richie said. He dragged his toe in the dirt. "Mike and I called pretty much every Polish person in the eastern United States. You have some distant cousins in Augusta, it turns out. If you ever want to meet them, they want to meet you."

Eddie hiccupped out a laugh. His throat was closed so tightly it was a wonder he had gotten that little sound out. Richie loved a big, romantic gesture, but he'd hit this one so far out of the ballpark that it made Eddie feel as if he was getting away with something. _Surely_ he'd been marked down for a grimmer fate than this; surely the timeline had gotten screwy at some point, and the real Eddie Kaspbrak was toiling in obscurity in New York, or maybe dead and buried under the ruins of Neibolt Street.

"Richie—" he began, and then came immediately to a halt.

The design embossed into the leather, he realized as he dragged his thumb against it soft outline, was not abstract triangles. It was a stand of pine trees.

"Do you not like it?" Richie said in a rush.

Eddie shook his head. "I can't _fucking_ believe you."

"What? Eddie—"

"Do I _like_ it?" Eddie interrupted, shaking his head furiously, squinting because he was absolutely tearing up and had been since the photo of his father. He jerked his head up and fixed Richie with a blurry, watery glare. "I mean—this is only the most amazing, the most romantic— _Richie."_

A smile broke across Richie's face, his crooked teeth and squinty eye and crow's-feet wrinkles all arranged into Eddie's favorite shape in the universe. "Ah," he said, to the others in a stage whisper, "Must have been a _good_ 'I can't fucking believe you,' then."

"Shut the fuck up!" Eddie ordered, feeling light-headed with happiness. Richie made him feel like a galaxy, spinning outwards out of control, flinging love at everything in his path. "You give me this, you fucking asshole, in front of all our friends, the night before I get to _marry_ you—and obviously I'm fucking crying, okay! So Patty, I guess you win!"

Patty, bless her, gasped and said, "Oh, no, _Eddie_ —" and moved as if to comfort him, but Richie beat her to it. With his usual gentleness, he seized hold of Eddie's good arm and hauled him upright, into his arms. The album ended up mashed between their ribcages, spearing Eddie in the numb spot where scar tissue covered his chest, but he couldn't bring himself to care, much less object.

"Eddie," Richie said with feeling, pressing his face into the crook of Eddie's neck like he was telling him a secret, "Don't be an idiot. Obviously _I_ win."

This kicked off two things at once, like a chain reaction: Eddie's heart skipped a beat so hard he swore he felt it leap against his ribs; and all of their friends yelled out, "Boo! Boo! Disgusting!"

"I mean, truly, so sappy," Bill chastised.

"Who could have known the Trashmouth could spew such Hallmark bullshit?" said Bev.

Eddie snorted out a wet laugh into Richie's shoulder and then whipped his head around to them. "Fuck off," he snapped. He couldn't stop clutching the album to his chest, as if it might slip through his grasp. "Also, you guys helped, huh? This is your fault too. So fuck all of you! Make me fucking cry the night before my wedding, why don't you!"

Six beaming faces looked up at him, smiling and unrepentant. It seemed completely unreal that these were the people Eddie had met in Derry all those years ago, grown up now and whole and happy. The handful of stars twinkled low in the sky; in the trees beyond the arch that Ben had built, the one that he and Richie would be married under, cardinals sang and flitted from branch to branch, little red hearts against a sea of green.

Eddie looked down at the album, with its pine tree design, and then back at his friends. "Thank you," he said simply, because there was just no way he would be able to put any other part of it into words. Wiping at his eyes with the back of his hand, he smiled, too. "For everything, you guys."

"We love you, Eddie," Bev said, and the others nodded their agreement. "Both of you."

"Yeah," Eddie said, leaning back against Richie, the photo album held reverently in his arms. "Well, the feeling is mutual."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content warnings: georgie is mentioned in passing; some mention of therapy & anxiety.
> 
> a sequel to engagement fic with no actual wedding?? it's more likely than you think!
> 
> also the poem that bill reads at the wedding is "Don't Hesitate" by Mary Oliver, which is a very eddie poem; mike reads "i carry your heart with me(i carry it in" by e.e. cummings.


End file.
